House of Misery
by NokuMarieDeux
Summary: Misery loves company... and she's having a house party over at the Sherman's place! (Originally posted January 2014 / reissued in chapter format July 2016)
1. Chapter 1

**THE HOUSE OF MISERY**

" _ **Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me,**_

 _ **'This is going to take more than one night.' "**_ _(Charles M. Schulz)_

 _ **Hello again...**_ _This here's Nonie Sherman with another excellent adventure from the chronicles of my sometimes illustrious ancestors, Slim Sherman an' Jess Harper. Now folks, if you make it all the way through to the end a this one you might say to yourself, 'Aw... that warn't nuthin' but just another tall tale!' But I swear every bit of it's true 'cause Great-Granddaddy Slim described this as Numero Dos on his list of 'Top Five Worst Experiences of My Life So Far' an' Great-Granddaddy Jess penned 'If anything like this ever happens again I'll just shoot myself and save someone else the trouble of having to do it.'_

 _You're probably thinkin' how interestin' can a story be 'bout a house fulla sick folks? But after readin' all them different journal accounts of this here particular fiasco I thought the whole thing was pretty darn comical an' a real good example a frontier ingenuity. 'Course, if I'da been there an' done that as either a patient or a caregiver, I reckon I wouldn'ta found it a dang bit amusin', the state of the medical arts bein' what they was back in them days..._

 _(_ _ **Note about writing-style continuity...**_ _Harp [that's my other half] seems to think I'm allowin' too much personal commentary to intrude on the storyline. Well la-di-da an' stick it in your ear, old man! For one thing, they's meant to convey_ _facts_ _what I think the readers oughta know about an' I can't help it if a personal opinion happens to fall in every now an' again. Harp also opines my writin' style lacks continuity an' confuses readers... on account of sometimes I write like Gracie Sherman, retired history teacher [which I am] an' sometimes I sound like plain ole Nonie Sherman, ranch wife. He may be right about that. I'll see what I can do but ain't makin' no promises, you unnerstand. If you got issues with that, go read some other story. Otherwise, thank you kindly for your patience! • Gracie Sherman—aka Nonie)_

 _CHAPTER ONE—PART ONE_

 **ON THE ROAD WITH A REMITTANCE MAN**

" _ **The more human beings proceed by plan, the more effectively they may be hit by accident."**_ _(Friedrich Dürrenmatt)_

 _ **(Gracie's preface...**_ _Your classic Victorian-era remittance man was usually some talentless ambition-challenged good-for-nothing slacker whose gotrocks family paid him a salary to go away and stay away from home for as long as they could afford it. With any luck he'd get himself killed early on by a coconut falling on his head while he was soaking up rays on a beach in Bora Bora and they could put the funds to better use—such as underwriting a generous dowry for a coyote-ugly shrew of a daughter to entice some near-sighted dimwitted fool into taking her off their hands._

 _Since Western Union hadn't got around to inventing wire fund transfers yet, they'd send money or bank drafts through the mail_ post restante _to prearranged pick-up points or—with your classier families—provide their black sheep with a personal letter of credit he could take to any affiliate bank and get cash from._

 _Now a_ _ **dark-side**_ _remittance man—often just a hop, skip and jump ahead of incarceration or retribution of the terminal variety—was one who'd either besmirched the family name back in the Old Country, run afoul of the authorities there whether accidently or with malice and aforethought, and/or perhaps had despoiled some innocent flower whose humorless and bad-tempered daddy wielded power and influence [read: even more money]._

 _The soldier of misfortune you're about to meet falls into the latter category, more or less. We pick up his trail in southeastern Wyoming—not his original destination... but then, excrement occurs.)_

 **Saturday, October 1 (midday)...** Traveling westward and following the stage route, our traveler (we'll call him 'Kim' on account of that's his real name) had started out that morning from the Hickman relay station near the Buford trading post, figuring on a break at the next stage stop before covering the remaining twelve miles to Laramie and calling it an early night there. The deceptively flat and featureless terrain had abruptly inclined toward a jumble of forbiddingly stark granite outcroppings—a place supposedly sacred to the natives, he'd been told... and cautioned to not stray too far from the road. Ahead of him rose the narrow Laramie mountain range. The hard rain of the previous evening (the reason he'd pitched his bedroll in the Hickman barn) had given way to a nice day, although the going was still mucky in the ruts. A thin band of cumulonimbus clouds building on the far southwestern horizon presaged another round of precipitation. Kim gauged that wet weather was still many hours off and reckoned he had plenty of time to reach town and get under cover.

Kim's wish list included checking his pony into a livery stable for oats and a well-earned respite, checking himself into whatever passed for a hotel, enjoying an invigorating steamy soak in a public bathhouse, and—after identifying the least greasy of available eating establishments—chowing down on something tasty and (more importantly) identifiable. (Breakfast had consisted of stale biscuits, refried beans, runny eggs of doubtful antiquity and sausage of dubious origin. Mister H's coffee had tasted like gunpowder recycled through a mule but at least it was hot _.)_ Then Kim was going to plant his weary carcass on a real feather mattress with down-filled pillows, pull a fluffy comforter up to his eyeballs and sleep until his kidneys floated him out of bed the next day, after which he intended to sashay over to the post office. That was the plan, anyway.

Of course, our traveler wasn't so delusional as to expect _all_ his desires would be fulfilled, having got an earful earlier from his less than jovial host. Mister Hickman had gloomily opined that Laramie amounted to little more than a ramshackle assemblage of shady commercial enterprises frequented by low-born vice-ridden scoundrels and crawling with vermin-infested heathens of the lowest order. (He hadn't been there in a while. Maybe he wasn't aware that now that the railroad had arrived, a higher class of white-collar criminal had taken up residence.) In other words, Laramie was a 'wretched hive of scum and villainy' (which phrase a certain Mister Lucas most certainly later cribbed from Mister Hickman).

"Them folks is so sorry they won't keer none 'bout yer Injun blood. You'll fit right in, sonny!" That worthy elder had thumped his Bible for emphasis before insisting his guest join him in select scriptural readings before breaking bread.

Actually, Kim took no offense—the gentleman was merely stating the obvious, which was fine by him. Since hitting the road he'd been constantly adjusting his appearance, demeanor and speech in order to pass unremarked and unmolested through the disparate subcultures springing up like mushrooms in these western territories. By keeping on the move and hiding in plain sight among the locals along the way he hoped to elude pursuit.

 **Everything about Kim** was shabby and travel-worn. He looked as if he had nothing worth stealing—certainly not his stumpy gargoyle-ugly pony. Due to a random combination of inherited multiethnic traits plus a few aberrant chromosomes in his DNA chain, Kim was a small-statured individual with a guileless, youthful face that belied his actual chronological age—he could and often did pass for a seventeen or eighteen year old. His personal appearance was so inoffensive most other men ignored him after a cursory appraisal rendered him unworthy, beneath their dignity to trifle with—just another mixed-breed mongrel kid. In six months of travel he'd encountered relatively little unpleasantness and only occasional inconvenience—until today, which we'll get to in a little bit.

It might've been nice to be the tall, dark and handsome dude with the macho physique the ladies seemed to go for, but there were definite advantages to being short(ish), blond(ish) and innocent-looking. In his very few forays into saloons and dance halls, gals had fussed over him because (he suspected) he reminded them of their baby brothers back on the farm. Unfortunately, they also rarely took him seriously. Once, after concluding his transaction with one of the angels of the night, she'd patted him on the head, given him his money back and said 'My treat, honey... no harm done!' More than a little demoralizing if he dwelt on it. Took awhile for his libido to recover from that incident, although he was confident he'd acquitted himself honorably enough.

There were aspects of Kim's person beyond disguise—for one thing, skin color just a shade darker than your average plainsman of European extraction. In another era he could've been just another Malibu beach bum with a glowing golden-brown tan and sun-bleached hair (except that surfing wouldn't be introduced to California until 1885). But if you happened to catch a glimpse below the equator, so to speak, you'd know that tan owed more to genetics than ultraviolet exposure. Kim's large, slightly protuberant eyes were unfortunately distinctive due to unusually colored irises—a rich sherry topaz that in ambient light glowed like a cougar's. Mustaches or a beard would have been helpful but the best he could do was caterpillar fuzz that might require scraping once a week or so. Then there was that tattoo between his shoulder blades, in a land where such body art was rarely seen except as practiced by indigenes— _that_ , at least, he could hide under a shirt.

 **Two weeks in-country** and several hundred miles away from his debarkation point, Kim arrived at the perplexing realization that he was losing his cultural identity—being often mistaken for part-Indian or part-Mexican, no matter that his eyes and hair were far too light for either ethnicity. He wasn't too sure how he felt—or ought to feel—about this, but finally concluded that it was probably an advantage in throwing any searchers off his trail.

At the beginning of his odyssey Kim didn't know enough about American aborigines to convincingly pass himself off as belonging to any one particular tribe. His first contact with natives was with members of the Makah nation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington Territory. The most striking impression he came away with was the eerie similarity between their artwork styles and what he carried on his back. But that was the only similarity. He still stood out like a sore thumb.

His problem was neatly solved when, crossing into Idaho, he encountered a band of fur traders heading east to their summer encampment at Spring Creek in Montana's Judith Basin, and from there to their permanent settlement in the Dakotas. They called themselves Métis, which literally _meant_ 'halfbreed'. These second and third-generation mountain men were a hodgepodge of mainly Scots, Irish, French, Cree, Chippewa and Shoshone with a spoonful of other marginal tribes and European nationalities thrown in for seasoning—a veritable hobo stew of humanity. Of the twenty-three individuals in the party whose skin color ranged from taffy tan to beaver brown, Kim fell squarely in the middle. Several had hair much lighter or much darker than Kim's as well, although none shared his peculiar eye color.

Readily accepting their invitation to ride along with them all the way to Spring Creek, Kim spent eight weeks among their families, enjoying their hospitality and immersing himself in their culture—in many respects not unlike his own. Their language—Michif—was a polyglot of native borrow-words, English and French (which Kim already had)... and he was a quick study. Being rather fond of tattoos themselves, they were enthralled with his, though they didn't understand what it represented. Their lexicon did not include a word for 'dragon'. Neither did their mythological oral traditions. Which is how he acquired the nickname _'Lézard Du Ciel_ ' or 'Sky Lizard'—as close as they could envision a fire-breathing lizard with wings. It wasn't long before most of the boys in the band were getting their mothers to replicate it in beadwork on the backs of their moosehide jackets.

 **Feeling he'd already stayed in one place** too long for comfort, Kim regretfully declined their invitation to winter over with them in the Dakotas and elected to turn south into Wyoming Territory. By then he'd cobbled together a creditable replacement identity, although presenting himself as an authentic American native halfbreed wasn't without its difficulties, of course (for every solution there's always a new problem).

He hacked his thick hair back to shoulder length and reassumed the more drab appearance of a typical drifter, except for the fancifully beaded mukluk moccasins and the osprey flight feather over his left ear (knotted into a tiny braided warlock by a laughing Métis maiden) which advertised his mixed-breed status without being overly specific. Having been advised that Métis rarely traveled solo and seldom ventured as far south as he intended to go, his cover would be that he was Sky Lizard of the fictional Osprey Band of Métis Makah, on his way to visit a sister who'd married into a band of Colorado Shoshone. _That's my story and I'm sticking to it!_ But in the two weeks since, no one had asked.

With no specific destination in mind, Kim had turned eastward at the South Pass and then south toward Cheyenne, where he debated hopping a train. Asking himself which provided the greater benefit—speed and distance or a cunningly convoluted trail—he opted to turn west toward Laramie.

 **Kim did not own** a projectile weapon of any description, having taken to heart this sentiment voiced by an old grizzled one-armed bullet-scarred veteran of the pistolero trade, wielding a sodden mop rag in a barroom in Seattle: _There are old gunslingers and there are bold gunslingers... but no old, bold gunslingers_ (paraphrased from a quotation attributed to E. Hamilton Lee in a later age but probably plagiarized from that old barkeep). Not that Kim had any interest in becoming one—handguns weren't his weapon of choice and he'd most likely end up shooting himself in the foot. Or his pants would fall down from the weight of the belt. Besides, he couldn't wrap his mind around the ethos of gunfighting—of men dedicated to shooting one another for sport or profit.

Kim's trapping skills were adequate to keep himself in snared hare and sage hen and any fool could catch fish. If a need for self-defense arose, he was pretty handy with the Chinese river pirate fighting knife in his belt sheath and the Japanese throwing knife in his moccasin boot. The eighteen-inch cane knife in its saddle sheath served other purposes. Mostly he depended on tact, agility and unobtrusiveness to either avoid trouble altogether or withdraw from it with his hide intact. Or he just flat ran like hell—which had been his response to the trouble he'd brought down on himself back home.

Although generally a sunny-natured optimistic fellow, our accidental tourist had a lot on his mind that fair October morning and was feeling quite discouraged about it all. He missed the familiar trappings of home and his noisy, fractious extended family thousands of miles away. He was anxious that all that zigzagging, doubling back and cutting across country might not be obscuring his trail as well as he hoped. And down below his as-yet undigested breakfast was roiling ominously.

 _CHAPTER ONE—PART TWO_

 **ONE A THEM DAYS**

" _ **The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."**_ _(Colin Wilson)_

 **At the same time...** Rancher Matthew 'Slim' Sherman's day hadn't gotten off to a good start. To begin with, he'd woke up feeling a bit off—nothing he could really put a finger on, just not quite himself. Before setting out to mend fences that morning he'd partaken of a modest breakfast as usual. Not so usual was barfing it right back up after five minutes on the jolting buckboard. And the morning had gone downhill from there.

A gust of wind had blown off his new hat, sailing it directly into a fresh cow pie. Then he'd gashed a thumb on some barbed wire. Then he'd discovered he was one short of replacement fence posts needed to finish the job. Finally, the handle on the shovel cracked. Giving up on fence mending for the day, Slim aimed the buckboard toward home, sucking on his injured digit and enduring with gritted teeth the shrieking of an axle in need of greasing. By the time he pulled up in the yard, one of the team was hobbling from having cast a shoe. Could it get any worse? Of course it could.

His little brother Andy glumly greeted him with the news that their new milch cow was once again on the lam. She was a four-year-old Jersey for which Slim had paid a suspiciously small sum. He should've known there had to be a good reason her previous owner was in such an all-fired hurry to get shet of her. Another clue should've been her original name: 'Trouble'. After three days he'd re-renamed her 'Deecy'—the prettified version of 'DC' for 'damned cow'. If not for the inarguable maxim that a growing child's health depended on a ready supply of fresh milk, he would've shot and butchered that damned cow weeks ago and enjoyed every mouthful of steak since.

"I checked the fence line... twice... honest, Slim!" Expecting a dressing down and close to tears, Andy peered up at his older brother. Minding the cow was his personal responsibility. Normally Slim would've unloaded on Andy there and then. But after doing a perimeter check himself just a few days ago, Slim was just as mystified as to how the cow was getting out... all the posts appeared upright and no wires missing or broken. No matter, there was nothing for it but to turn around and hunt her down before she wandered off too far. He jumped down from the buckboard seat.

"I know you did. I'm not blaming you... this time... but..."

"Slim!" The husky voice of Slim Sherman's number one (and at the moment _only_ ) hired hand rasped from the shadows beneath the lean-to where he'd been laboring at the forge all morning.

"Yeah Jess, what is it?"

"Could I see you over here?"

"In a minute..."

" _Now,_ please?"

 **Slim threw him an irritated glance** but asked Andy to get him some coffee while he unhitched the team. The boy turned away toward the house as Slim watched him with questioning eyes. Andy was usually so full of vitality, running instead of walking, but he'd been sniffling the past few days and today was dragging his heels. It was no easy business, raising a brother almost young enough to be his own son, but Slim felt he'd done a creditable job these past two years in the absence of any formal educational facilities or a civilizing female presence in the home. Sighing, he turned toward the forge and his filthy sweat-grimed ranch hand, shirtless under a grease-stiffened leather apron.

A little over five months ago when Jess Harper first appeared, Slim—two years older and half a head taller—could probably have easily bested him in a wrestling match. Not a big man to begin with, Jess had arrived in less than prime fettle—legacy of years on the drift and irregular meals. Between the family cook's determined efforts to 'feed him up some' and the sheer effort of daily dawn-to-dusk physical labor required to keep a ranch going, he now sported greatly improved upper body musculature, but for all that he remained slender and wiry. Slim, on the other hand, had always been a big-boned man and inclined to put on an extra pound or two whenever he slowed down, which was hardly ever except in the worst winter weather months.

Neither one liked forge work or fence repair, but neither chore could be put off, so they'd flipped a coin and Jess had lost.

" **Whaddya want?"**

"I don't _want_ anythin'..." Jess growled. "I just wanna _say_ somethin'..." Azure eyes gleamed out of a soot-blacked face.

"If you just _have_ to..." Slim sighed with resignation.

Jess, too, had noticed something definitely amiss with Andy but reckoned he was just suffering a spell of the moody blues—which he'd been having a lot of lately—and was thinking the boy could do with some distraction from his teenage woes.

"Why don't you take Andy... give him a chance to do a little trackin' an' ropin'? He'd like that."

"He's not done with his chores."

"I'll finish up for him. I need a break anyway... an' he could use a little brother time," Jess volunteered, reminding his buddy of promises made only a few weeks ago—that Slim was going to be less rigid about rules and more accommodating about Andy's needs as an emerging adolescent.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _It'd only been a month since the two friends'd got in a big ole flap over Andy's behavior and Slim's parenting technique, which Jess didn't have no room to talk about but did anyway. You'll have to read_ 'Sea Change' _if you wanna know what all that was about.)_

As he walked back out to the wagon with Slim, Jess noted his friend didn't seem up to snuff either. "Or I'll go after Deecy, if you'd druther... you look done in already an' the day ain't half over yet."

"No, I'll go," Slim sighed. "Hate to leave you with..."

Jess grinned. "Yeah, yeah, yeah... trust you to always go for the easy job..."

Andy returned, coffee-less. "Jonesy says there ain't any left but he can put a fresh pot on..."

" ' _Isn't'_ not _'ain't'_..." Slim corrected automatically. To Jess he said, "I guess it wouldn't hurt... just this once. If you don't mind the extra work..."

"Don't mind a'tall... an' it'll cheer him up."

Andy looked expectantly from one to the other until Slim spoke to him with faked sternness. "It's time you learned the consequences of letting an animal under your supervision escape, Andrew."

The boy's face fell. "Aw, Slim... I said I was sorry..."

"I'm afraid you're going to have to do the tracking and catching, sonny. I'll just go along for moral support."

Andy's eyes were big as dinner plates. "You mean it, Slim? You're lettin' me ride with you... oh... but I ain't... isn't done with all my chores yet."

Slim winced. " _'I'm not'_ , not _'I isn't'_..."

Jess snickered. "He don't never let up, does he?"

Andy let the latest correction pass. Sometimes his older brother's relentless insistence on proper grammar got on his last nerve.

"Your pal here's offered to finish your chores," Slim continued.

"Gee, thanks, Jess! I'll go get PeeWee." He started toward the pasture.

"Wait a minute!" Jess called him back. "C'mere, pard. This job calls for a _real_ horse... you take Traveler—he needs the exercise anyway. An' use my saddle, not yours."

Both Shermans' eyebrows crawled up to their hairlines—Jess _never_ offered to share his horse if he could help it.

"Might as well get Alamo, too, while you're at it..." Slim put in hastily.

Andy ducked into the barn for two leads and the 'bait bucket'—a battered tin pail half-filled with hard kernels of corn that rattled enticingly whenever one wished to attract the attention of horses—and happily skipped off to fetch both horses from the pasture, whatever was ailing him earlier forgotten. Slim found himself the object of a long meaningful look from his partner. He knew that look. The younger man had something to say about their bone of contention—Andy—but was doing a poor job of holding back. No doubt remembering, as was Slim himself, the debacle resulting from the last time he'd spouted off about Slim's parenting skills.

"Go ahead... spit it out, Jess, before you choke on it..."

 **"Boy needs a decent horse..."** Jess mumbled, sidling away under the pretense of leading Jake and his teammate Willy into the corral, noting the missing shoe and making a mental note to take care of that later on.

"I know that!" Slim shot back, trying not to be defensive as they walked into the barn together to get their tack. Last summer's growth spurt had made it abundantly clear that Andy would soon outgrow his beloved pony.

Jess Harper had many good qualities but picking up a cue that someone else wasn't in the mood to debate a touchy subject wasn't one of them...

"Well, then... what about lettin' him have Scout... like he was supposed to in the first place?"

"Who told you that?"

"Jonesy mentioned it a while back... right after you told me to use him as my remount."

"That old man talks too much."

Scout and Ranger, Slim's remount, were three-year-old bay geldings, issue of Slim's Quarterhorse mares bred to neighbor Garland Bartlett's Morgan stallion, Colonel. True... it _had_ been Slim's intention to present Scout to Andy as a surprise on his thirteenth birthday, but by then Jess had been there two months and needed an immediately usable remount, not one requiring training. Slim had been meaning to look around for another suitable horse for Andy as the only other ranch-raised colts on hand were yearlings.

"I'll get around to it... when I can find the time..."

"Plenty of good horses on the range... why, I seen a band just the other day..."

"Forget it," Slim forestalled. "We've got too much to do as it is without having to break in wild stock... besides, I don't want him on something that might go haywire without warning."

Privately, Jess didn't believe a wild-caught horse was any more dangerous than a green ranch-raised one—they fought and bucked just the same first time under saddle. Once broken and trained, a mustang made as fine a working horse as anything with proven bloodlines that you had to pay good money for... and they were free for the taking. He was about to ask if the boss had any objection to his catching, breaking and training a range horse _for his own use_ and _on his own time_ when he realized Slim was speaking to him...

 **"Sorry... you was sayin'?"**

"I said... I _am_ curious about one thing... why did you tell Andy to use _your_ saddle? What's wrong with his?"

Jess' saddle was a new Denver Heiser and he took particular loving care of it as if it were a family heirloom. He would have brought it into the parlor every evening for a daily soaping, oiling and polishing if Jonesy hadn't threatened him with bodily harm. Jess knew his next words would aggravate Slim but he said them anyway.

"It don't fit him no more. Guess that's somethin' else you ain't had time to notice."

Slim threw his saddle on the top fence rail with more force than strictly necessary.

"Jess... don't start with me... I mean it. Not today. I'm just not up to it, okay?"

"Okay. You did ask, though..."

Andy walked up leading the two horses, looking suspiciously from his brother to his friend. "You're not fighting again, are you?"

" 'Course not," Jess said, running a currycomb over Traveler's back to remove any speck of irritant before placing the blanket and meticulously smoothing it down. "We're just havin' us a difference of opinion, is all." He stepped back and motioned to Andy to carry on, all the while observing with a hawk's eye to make sure the saddle was seated properly.

Slim and Jess double-checked cinches and secured catch ropes. Andy got a boost up, fidgeting with excitement as Jess shortened the stirrups for him. As the pair moved off, Slim called back with false heartiness, "Save us some lunch, hear? Don't you go eating it all by yourself!"


	2. Chapter 2

_CHAPTER TWO—PART ONE_

 **TO CATCH A COW**

" _ **Don't have a cow, man."**_ _(Bart Simpson)_

 **Somewhat later** Slim gnawed his bottom lip with impatience until Andy, with a whoop of accomplishment, finally picked up the cow's tracks not too far outside the pasture fence. After that they easily followed her progress from one patch of yellowing grass to another. Letting his brother ride point and struggling to keep advice to himself, Slim allowed his thoughts to wander in free association while keeping his eyes peeled not only for the errant bovine but for any one of a hundred perils that might be lurking up the next draw or over the next hill. Slim was one of those orderly-minded folks who could pursue four or five different lines of thought at a time... _If we plowed this section and planted alfalfa, or maybe some winter wheat, we could put up our own hay... Andy's big and strong enough now to handle a plow... but Jess... no, can't see him ever agreeing to sodbuster work. He'd go back to drifting before he'd live in a web of barbed wire..._

In all honesty, Slim had to admit he couldn't picture himself behind a plow either, although he'd done his share as a youngster when Pa was still alive and the family dependent on its own produce... back when Laramie was just a double row of tents and shanties thrown up in the middle of nowhere to service gold seekers, settlers and drovers. Besides which, he had other plans for Andrew.

No... he'd have to continue addressing the problem of winter hay the same old way—bartering a few culls from the breeding stock for custom mowing by one of his neighbors who owned the right equipment. The fall sales had been profitable enough to keep the ranch going over the winter—barely, barring unforeseen circumstances—and to set aside a little towards Andy's education... but... Slim hadn't factored in the expense of a full-time resident ranch hand.

Up until now Slim'd made do with temporary help when needed—preferably local farmers' sons willing to work in exchange for a steer or two for their families' larders and not requiring room and board or wages... but... this year there was Jess.

 **Slim had many friends** but none he could claim as close—no best friend—and he hadn't been looking for one when Jess had come along... a stranger with a shady past, with a lifestyle diametrically opposed to Slim's admittedly staid existence. Bringing Jess on board had been a spur-of-the-moment decision based on emotion rather than careful consideration of the consequences. They had agreed at the time that it was to be a trial arrangement for them both—one that could be dissolved with a fare-thee-well handshake if either found it to be unsatisfactory.

Because the bunkhouse Slim had begun building last year remained unfinished and uninhabitable, Jess was obliged to lodge inside the family abode along with Slim and Andy and their general factotum/surrogate uncle Jebediah Jones. The enforced intimacy of such a volatile personality among three relatively calm individuals could have resulted in strife. Instead, Slim's relationship to his employee had evolved into more of a partnership and against his better judgment was also ripening into a deeper friendship. While Slim and Jonesy still harbored deeply concealed reservations about Jess' future as a member of the household (as, no doubt, did Jess himself), the boy and the gunfighter turned ranch hand had formed an incontrovertible bond. In Andy's mind there was no 'if' or 'maybe' about Jess' continued presence: it was 'forever', which is why he was always caught short and plunged into a pit of despondency every time Jess went off on one of his tangents.

Frankly, Slim was surprised that the man had stuck around as long as he had—but grateful, for Andy's sake as well for the fact that when Jess _was_ here he earned his keep and then some. He might not always show enthusiasm for a specific task but tackled whatever he was asked to do with determination and always gave his personal best. Because of this and Jess' demonstrated loyalty to his 'adopted family', Slim was inclined to forgive the inconveniences and troubles caused by the man's recurring absences.

 **Jogging along behind Andy,** Slim thought about the winter to come. All in all, setting aside the personal aspect, taking on a full-time hired hand had proven a worthwhile investment. Between the two of them they'd laid twice as much fencing as Slim had anticipated getting done that season. Theoretically, with two people rounding up the free-range stock into winter pasturage, that job could be accomplished in half the time it would have taken Slim riding solo or with part-time help. With Andy's growth spurt over the summer the boy was now physically mature enough to be entrusted with helping Jonesy with the stage relay teams, leaving Slim and his new assistant time to attend to other matters... like new construction.

With an optimistic eye to the future, when he'd be able to afford more cattle and hired hands to mind them, Slim was planning to add to the back of the barn an open-sided roofed shed where extra hay could be stored out of the weather. But before that he needed to finish a project he'd started back in the spring—that bunk house behind the ranch house... where the original soddy had once stood. To that end Slim had put in footings and got as far as installing the floor and framing the walls. The ridge beam, purlins and common rafters were in place but his start on the roof portion had been abandoned at calving time and he hadn't been able to get back to it since.

Another planned project was installation of a sink in the kitchen with its own pump handle and drain and intake line running from the well. Although the well pump itself was just outside the kitchen door, it was such a nuisance having to run outside (especially in bad weather) whenever water was needed. Right now Andy had bucket duty, but when he left for boarding school next year (providing Slim had the necessary funds saved up by then) that chore would fall to Jonesy, whose bad back was getting worse along with his arthritis. A sink meant plumbing... which wasn't within Slim's scope... he'd have to hire someone for that. All he needed was time and money.

Time and money... money or time. It always boiled down to a lack of one or the other or both. And time _was_ money. Right now Slim was rueing all the time they were wasting, having to chase that dadblasted cow... time that could be better spent, say, gathering firewood. In another part of his brain he was noting deadfalls he and Jess could return to later with axes, saws and the buckboard to load wood onto... when they had the time. If not, then he'd have to pay someone else to deliver firewood.

 **Checking his pocket watch,** Slim was chagrined to find how many hours had passed. He could have tracked the animal in half the time but—he reminded himself sternly—the whole point of this enterprise (aside from recapturing Deecy) was spending quality time with his young brother. Not that they were conversing much—they weren't, aside from occasional queries from Andy. It was just _being_ together, with Slim's attention focused (more or less) entirely on Andy.

At last they came across the miscreant in a small meadow, chewing her cud in placid repose and giving them the hairy eyeball as they approached. A lantern flickered on in her little cow brain and she lumbered to her feet, understanding that they were coming for _her_. And that's when things went sideways. Instead of fleeing in the opposite direction as expected, she lowered her head and shook it from side to side, pawing the ground like a bull at a _corrida_ as if to say 'come and get me, fool!'

Traveler was fretting at the bit and pawing the ground just as ferociously, lathering to get at that cow. (Definitely, that horse had been around Jess Harper too long—couldn't resist a challenge.)

Before Slim could caution Andy, the boy had jammed his hat down and shaken out his rope. Cow and horse charged each other like a pair of medieval jousters at a tournament. Andy's loop slapped harmlessly across her back as those sharp horns whizzed perilously close to Traveler's belly and Andy's leg.

Slim bit his tongue. He could have gone in and hazed but decided to let Andy make that call if he felt he needed the assistance. On the fourth pass Andy managed to drop the loop over her horns but not around her neck, which might have been preferable. Did he have that rope dallied tight? Yes... yes, he did. Slim chewed a thumbnail.

When Deecy realized she'd been snagged she sunfished and dug her feet in. Traveler backed up until the line went tight, then squatted, trying to pull her off balance. Slim nibbled a cuticle, beginning to suspect he might have been rooked by the seller of this supposedly _purebred_ , supposedly _docile_ Jersey... which evidently contained more than a drop or two of _ganado bravo._

 **A nagging worry was tugging at him** —his morning unease had developed into a throat tickle and he still had that headache. He hoped he wasn't coming down with his annual head cold, which wouldn't stop him from working but sure would put a hitch in his gitalong, having to stop and honk his nose every few minutes. If he ignored it maybe it would just go away.

With an outraged bellow Deecy lunged toward Traveler, who did a lateral arabesque as she swept past. He swapped ends to brace against impact. Eight hundred pounds of cow hit the end of the rope, doing a one-eighty flop to the ground and lying there stunned. Traveler knew his stuff and did it well, requiring no input from his rider. Slim half-hoped the goldarn animal had broken her neck, saving him a bullet.

He'd been having second thoughts about the wisdom of putting his little brother in harm's way but relaxed a bit when he realized the boy was concentrating on keeping his seat and letting the horse do his thing on a loose rein. Several conflicting thoughts were rattling around in Slim's head. As a stockman, he hated the idea of losing any cow—even one as arbitrary as this one, not to mention the calf she was carrying. As head of household and chief provider, he calculated how long it would take to return to the barn, rehitch the team, get back out here, drag the carcass up and onto the wagon, get it home, dress it out and get it hung in the smokehouse before the meat spoiled. They'd be at it all night. As a thoroughly irked rancher, he'd welcome one less problem on his plate.

But—as luck would have it (no matter which way he looked at it)—she wasn't dead, just mildly inconvenienced. Staggering back on her feet, she snorted and launched herself at the enemy once again. This _faena_ went on for another five minutes before Traveler lost his last thread of patience, taking an almighty chaw out of the cow's ear with big yellow teeth. At that point, she acceded defeat and decided to come along quietly.

Andy was grinning from ear to ear and Slim was generous with his compliments and congratulations. Andy for his part cheerfully gave credit where credit was due, to his borrowed horse: "Traveler sure knows his business... he's the best ropin' horse I ever saw! No wonder Jess is so proud of him!"

 **As they were already** several miles northeast of the ranch compound, Slim concluded—rather than backtrack the way they'd come—they might as well continue the circle around the east side of Hourglass Canyon and pick up the stage road, where the going was smoother if still sloppy in the low spots. Cow recovery had taken a lot longer than anticipated.

As the brothers rode side-by-side Slim noticed, out of the corner of his eye, Andy repeatedly scratching around his ears and neck. "Poison ivy again? I've shown you a hundred times what it looks like."

"No, Slim... I ain't... I haven't been near any a that stuff."

"Then why are you scratching?"

"Dunno. Just itches, is all."

"You'd better not have head lice again!" That was an experience Slim didn't care to repeat—Andy had squalled like a stuck pig during treatment and the house had stunk of coal tar for days afterward.

"How can I get head lice if I _never_ get to go _anywhere_ and I _never_ get to visit _anybody_?"

Definitely a petulant tone there that Slim hadn't heard in days... and here the boy'd been doing so well lately! Yes, he knew he was guilty of mother-henning his younger brother... as Jonesy—and now Jess although with less subtlety—had been of late pointing out more and more frequently. Fleeting memories danced through his head: his parents' whispered arguments, when they thought he was sleeping—Matthew Senior insisting their son was old enough and big enough to merit more freedom of movement. Mary Grace countering fiercely that she intended keeping her only surviving child close at hand and safe as long as she could! In the end, Mother Nature had stepped in and neatly snipped the apron strings by sending her another baby on which to focus her attentions.

Slim felt a sneeze building up. Naturally, the longer he tried to contain it, the more explosive the pent-up pressure. When that _achoo_ achieved escape velocity and cut loose, it ruffled Alamo's mane and caused him to shy (just a little).

"Bless you!" Andy offered. "Are you feeling all right, Slim?"

"I'm fine. Just road dust."

Andy refrained from pointing out that the road below was muddy. Ergo, no road dust. "You don't look so good," the boy said instead.

"I said I'm fine. Don't worry about it," Slim snarked.

 **Approaching the single-lane zone** through the canyon, Slim consulted his pocket watch again—nearing four-thirty. He could see from the fresh tracks that the afternoon stage had already gone through, but it never hurt to double-check—it wouldn't do to be caught halfway across the bottleneck leading a cow. They were good to go.

Slim happened to glance to the right as they passed the open slope leading down to the water. The lovely little lake contained in the northern basin of the closed canyon had proven an attractive nuisance, slyly inviting overheated passers-by to come on down, have a dip in her cooling waters... and with that convenient open space offering such easy, irresistible access to her skirts! Slim had discovered, when he was Andy's age, how lethally inconvenient that access really was. He'd decided to take his pony straight down that slope as a shortcut to the lake. He'd survived his broken arm but the pony had to be put down. Others had suffered the same fate... or worse.

Slim had been intending to fence it off as a safety measure, but grazing lands always had a higher priority on his time. As a make-do hazard marker, Slim had last year posted a sign right next to the survey stake marking a ranch boundary. At least, the sign _had_ stood there.

Looking down, he pieced together the evidence, as easy to read as a grammar school primer: fresh prints of an unshod horse turning off the road, furrows in the loose shale where the animal had slalomed right over the sign now in pieces on the slope, churned up turf where the horse had thrashed around in the marsh below before regaining its footing. What he couldn't see, because of clumps of vegetation in the way, was an actual horse.

Slim signaled Andy to pull up. Telling him to wait on the road, he dismounted and slipped his rifle out of its scabbard. Most likely there was a range horse down there with a broken leg and he'd have to put it out of its misery... but a second closer look revealed someone's hat hung up in the reeds, which indicated a rider down there as well. Backtracking fifty feet, Slim made his way down a hidden path to the water, which put him in a position to scan the shoreline.

Whatever he was expecting to encounter, it certainly wasn't a homely dun pony up to its belly in the shallows, with laundry spread across its back... and a naked man covered in soapsuds.

 _CHAPTER TWO—PART TWO_

 **AN ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN**

" _ **Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time."**_ _(Dejan Stojanovic)_

 **Somewhat earlier...** Kim and his pony Scooter were approaching a sandstone ridge with a defile through which the stage road passed. Attaining the summit, Kim saw that the road immediately funneled downward at a sharp grade between the steep, drill-marked walls of a dynamited cut. At the bottom of the grade, he pulled up to have a look around and admire the scenery—a roughly hourglass-shaped enclosed canyon with a cerulean-blue lake nestled in the oval basin to the north. Where the road transected the waist of the hourglass, engineers had used blast rubble to raise the roadbed, which had then been surfaced with impacted gravel and caliche. Somewhere down below an underbed spillway allowed drainage from the impounded lake to cascade over a jumble of boulders plunging precipitously to the floor of the lower-lying southern basin to form a stream. The twin basins were circumscribed by sandstone escarpments overlooking mixed vegetation bordering the lake and the stream. On the other side of the transverse the road rose again toward the next defile.

This feature tallied perfectly with Mister Hickman's description of the fifteen miles separating his establishment from the Shermans' and Kim's own knowledge of how much ground his horse could travel at a moderate pace, which was about four miles per hour. The last relay station before Laramie should lie beyond the next rise, with the canyon just inside the far eastern perimeter of the Sherman ranch.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _A long-ago geologic burp had caused a subsidence over a minor fault line slightly to the east of the Laramie mountain range, resulting in the hidden canyon. The escarpments, the lake and the rock bridge no longer exist as described in my ancestor's journals—the great Colorado earthquake of 1882 saw to that, long after the stage route had been abandoned anyway. All that's there now is a rocky crevasse. Nature gaveth and nature tooketh away in a blast of subterranean flatulence.)_

 **There was no shoulder at all** on the south side of the rock bridge. On the north side, a narrow verge of no more than two feet in width gave onto a grass-carpeted, deceptively gentle slope descending about forty feet to a marshy area bordering the lake's southern shoreline. Halfway down a signpost prominently displayed in large lettering _'DANGER! Sherman Ranch. Private Property. No Trespassing'_ , to which some wag had added _'Violators Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again.'_ Unknown to the casual observer, the gracefully waving grasses adorning the slope eked out their precarious existence from a wafer-thin mantle of soil overlying a deeper layer of porous unimpacted caliche—still sodden with the overnight rain and slick as an otter slide. This was one part of Kim's problem-to-be.

The other part was that the road-builders, in the interest of economy and avoidance of unnecessary labor, had made that portion of the road crossing the canyon between the two defiles just wide enough to accommodate one stagecoach... with a cat whisker to spare on either side. Those who regularly traveled this route—whether on foot, horseback or driving a wagon—were well aware of these chokepoints and always checked coach schedules before venturing through, timing their roadtrips to avoid the morning and afternoon rush hours on the stageline.

Although the stage company had also posted signs at either side warning of the danger zone, the world is unfortunately populated by stupid people, inattentive people, and people who don't believe such advisements apply to them. Kim was far from stupid, but on this occasion he was guilty of gross inattentiveness and that's what got him into trouble that afternoon. It was afternoon—about time for that westbound stage to tear through—and there was our traveler, lost in thought and loitering in the middle of the highway.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's observation...**_ _Have you ever noticed that very bright people are prone to daydreaming on account of their brains are so busy, and that they often display a deplorable lack of common sense?)_

 **Scooter was not** exceptionally intelligent as horses go (which isn't saying much) and he had a basically one-track mind (food), but his sensory equipment was in good working order, along with that obscure equine sixth sense which locks onto any inattention on the part of the rider, followed by an impulse to take advantage of it. So, while Kim was woolgathering atop, Scooter had sidled over to that narrow grassy verge and was helping himself to whatever he could reach. His hind legs were still firmly anchored on what passed for pavement but his forelegs were inching closer and closer to the edge.

Now Scooter was a pretty good horse, despite his lack of visual appeal. Among other advantages, he could travel very long distances at a steady clip. He was an easy keeper, able to subsist on less forage than your average mountain goat. And like that nimble creature, he normally was sure-footed enough to negotiate rocky, almost vertical terrain with ease and usually exercised good judgment about where to step safely—the key words here being _normally_ and _usually_. He had a few idiosyncrasies—he wouldn't take a bit, he couldn't bear being shod, he hated cattle, and he was scared shitless of loud noises.

Scooter was aiming for a juicier-looking clump of vegetation just a little bit lower down when he heard the rumble and felt the vibrations of four sets of pounding hooves and fast-approaching coach wheels. With one googly-eyed backward glance at imminent disaster barreling down that steep grade toward him, he shot right over the edge of the embankment. He realized his error as soon as his forelegs started slipping, immediately sinking to his haunches. But it was no use—the moment his hind legs left the hardpan he'd already passed the point of no return.


	3. Chapter 3

_CHAPTER THREE—PART ONE_

 **DISASTER ON A DOWNHILL SLOPE**

" _ **The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances."**_ _(Aristotle)_

 **Gathering momentum,** Scooter tobogganed downhill, catching the signpost with his chest. Kim attempted to counterbalance and abort the slide by leaning as far back as he could, which had no effect other than to further disrupt the animal's center of gravity. At the next to last second he had the presence of mind to fling himself out of the saddle just as Scooter's front legs buckled at the bottom of the slope.

Kim came to a few moments later, flat on his back in a bog, thinking that if he hadn't already crossed over to the Elysian Fields he'd likely be getting there pretty soon—what with a dead horse's heavy head and neck across his torso, squashing him down into the mud and rendering him unable to breathe. Nor could he hear, with murky water filling his ears and sloshing over his face. All he could see directly above and in his peripheral vision was blue sky beginning to clutter with cotton-puff clouds and greenish-brown reeds on either side.

As it happened, Scooter wasn't dead after all... he scrambled to his feet, snorting gobs of mud and boogers—mostly on Kim's face—and shaking himself mightily. Quickly getting over his scare and noting the lush greenery only yards away, he daintily stepped over his master's body to go for it.

With the weight removed from his mid-section Kim could breathe again, which was good. But it hurt to do so, which wasn't. He decided it might be a good idea to take a little timeout to consider his physical condition... definitely not good at all. Mostly he was numb... except that every inhalation was accompanied by a sharp pain in his chest. His arms and legs didn't want to cooperate either and he was about to panic when he realized he was quite literally stuck in the mud.

Getting himself unstuck was torturous, and when he was finally able to roll over and up on his hands and knees— _Mère de Dieu!_ —the pain was incredible. He splatted face down and came up gagging, regurgitating pond scum. Breakfast made a break for it in a violent spate of projectile vomiting until nothing was left but ropes of mucus spiraling into the water. Each spasm was sheer agony but at least these cleared the water from his ears so he could hear again. He was panting like a woman in labor and every time he tried to take in a deep lungful of air sharp knives stabbed him in the chest and his vision blurred.

 **When Scooter finally deigned** to respond to a come-to-me whistle, Kim was appalled at his pony's bunged up knees and the bloody gash in his chest. Using a stirrup to pull himself to his feet, he urged Scooter out of the mire up onto a firmer area of the bank.

The first thing he needed to do was get that saddle off, which took a while because it was skewed sideways with the latigo under Scooter's belly where Kim couldn't get at it and his shaking fingers couldn't loosen the off billet. In desperation he slid the stiletto from his moccasin boots and slit the cinch. The saddle fell off to one side and Kim slid to the ground on the other. The pony stepped away and went back to grazing, crimson rivulets running down his front legs.

Kim crawled on his hands and knees over to the saddle, dragging it and all its accoutrements over to a fallen log, at which point he passed out again. Coming to a few minutes later, he had to rest for a while with his back against the log before attempting his next mission. He reviewed his status (not good) and options (not many).

He was slathered and soaked with mud, blood, puke and other effluvia he didn't want to think about. He knew he was too badly hurt to make it back up to the road under his own steam, much less find a path to lead his injured pony up there. He had no way of closing the pony's chest wound or any liniment for the animal's swelling knees. The best Kim could do was make a rudimentary camp and hope some Good Samaritan came along to rescue them.

What he _did_ have was a crystal clear lake that appeared to be spring-fed—he couldn't see any creeks debouching into it, which meant the water was probably as cold as the proverbial witch's mammary. An idea blossomed in his muddled mind: very cold water would retard bleeding and reduce swelling on both of them, with the added bonus of washing off all the grunge.

 **But before Kim** could accomplish that, he needed to be able to move around without feeling as if someone were hacking away at his ribs with a rusty ripsaw. Rummaging around in a soaked saddlebag, he came up with a bar of soap and a waterproofed parcel he'd been hoarding in the event of medical emergency, for which this definitely qualified. He placed the soap on the grass beside him and from the pouch extracted matches, rolling papers and a smaller drawstring bag of coarsely-crumbled grayish-green plant material.

With trembling fingers Kim carefully assembled a lumpy joint the size of a Cuban _figurado_ , set fire to it and resolutely inhaled until it burned down to his fingertips. Five minutes later he was feeling pleasantly floaty and five minutes after that the acute pain had mellowed down to a dull throb he could deal with—as long as he didn't make any sudden movements.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note**_ _... Let's step aside here for a brief dissertation on the properties of the lowly hemp weed—_ cannabis _—which North American colonists and settlers had long cultivated as a convenient source of industrial and textile fiber for the production of rope and cloth. In the 1800s and into the 1900s liquid extract of cannabis was commonly available as a pain-relieving tincture or elixir wherever pharmaceutical products were sold. It had not yet occurred to these gentlefolk of mainly European extraction to stick it in their pipes and smoke it, although a goodly number of Native Americans and persons of Mexican heritage had long been acquainted with its euphoric effects when inhaled in its gaseous form. Cannabis has been cultivated globally for thousands of years and prized for its palliative and hallucinogenic qualities._

 _What Kim had in his pouch of happy weed was a blend of both_ cannabis indica _and_ cannabis sativa _, grown especially for medicinal and ceremonial use. Cannabis won't fix your broken bones, but while the high lasts you really don't give a rat's ass. And while immersing yourself in frigid water while stoned out of your gourd probably isn't the wisest move, it did seem a logical expedient at the time.)_

 **It took forever to toe off** his footgear and unbutton his shirt and britches. He rolled up his fouled clothes and tucked them under one arm. Whistling for Scooter again, Kim clung to the bosal for support with one hand, soap firmly grasped in the other, and coaxed the reluctant animal down in the icy waters of the lake. Which is where Slim Sherman found them.

 _CHAPTER THREE—PART TWO_

 **CHAOS AT THE STAGE STOP**

" _ **Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once."**_ _(Paulo Coelho)_

 **Meanwhile, back at the ranch...** Jebediah Jones wasn't in the best of moods, to say the least. An almighty crick in his sacroiliac just wouldn't let up even though he'd used half a bottle of his own homemade horse liniment on it. Warm compresses helped the back pain some, but he couldn't very well creep around all day with a wad of wet stinking flannel tucked inside the backside of his britches. The previous night's rain had caused the arthritis in his knees, shoulders and wrists to flare up. At breakfast he'd nearly dropped a crock of flapjack batter on the floor and needed both hands to handle the cast iron skillet. He'd barely managed to lift the coffeepot to serve the stage passengers during the morning stop-and-swap.

Done for the day with forge work, Jess had washed up and changed into clean clothes by the time the afternoon stage rumbled in right on schedule. Through the kitchen window Jonesy counted four gentlemen passengers (no ladies today) disembarking the vehicle with Jess pointing toward the house, where Jonesy had already set out cups, plates, forks and napkins on the parlor table. Though moving slowly, he quartered one of the two apple pies he'd baked earlier and carried them to the table along with slices of wheel cheese. Cream and sugar were there for whoever might want some with their coffee. The Sherman station didn't make a whole lot of profit from Jonesy's travel snack concession, but every little bit helped.

While Jess and Old Mose (who'd been driving coaches since Paul journeyed to Damascus) changed out the horses, the passengers tucked into their repast. Fifteen minutes later, after congratulating the cook on his tasty pastry, the four reboarded their conveyance and Mose clambered back up on the box.

Jonesy and Jess were standing to the side to see them off, as they normally did. The stage was just about ready to depart when something about that off lead horse caught Jess' eye and he went around to investigate. Bending over, he seemed to have found something amiss with a heel chain and was fiddling around down there.

As we've already seen in the previous chapter, freak accidents involving horseflesh can happen anywhere, anytime... even to the most careful of riders and attendants... but why did it have to happen _today_ , when Slim and Andy were out of communications range and Jonesy in no shape to handle an emergency?

The horses were already powered up in anticipation of their marching orders and all traces were taut, preventing Jess from making whatever adjustment he was aiming to make. Now Mose had to be at least a decade older than Jonesy, which put him in his early seventies, and he was getting hard of hearing. So when Jess hollered _'back up'_ (at the two lead horses, not at Mose) what Mose heard was _'git up'_ and he slapped rein.

The horses surged forward. The brass hook end on Off Lead's singletree caught Jess in the head, knocking him down and out. Although Off Wheel was high-stepping to avoid trampling directly on Jess, equine metacarpus met human tibia with a resounding _thwack!_... breaking Jess' right leg below the knee.

 **Mose damned near snatched** the heads off all four horses and almost broke the brake getting that coach stopped. He nearly ruptured himself scrambling off the driver's seat and running back, wailing _'I done kilt him!'_ See, he thought he'd run over Jess with the coach itself. Jonesy was frozen with horror as he, too, figured Jess was a goner. He'd been on the other side of the coach so hadn't witnessed how close Jess had come to _not_ being roadkill.

All four of those gentlemen passengers boiled out to help carry the victim indoors and lay him on the fainting couch in the parlor. By divine providence one of them happened to be a pharmaceutical and medical instruments salesman and two had served as medical attendants during the Late Unpleasantness. The two former medics offered their expertise in bonesetting while the drug peddler graciously offered to donate whatever he could spare in the way of sedatives and analgesics from his sample case.

One of the retired sawbones suggested administering a light dose of morphine before they got started, rather than waiting until the victim regained consciousness (if he woke up at all, that is...the head wound wasn't extensive but it _was_ bleeding copiously). Jonesy concurred, knowing of Jess' pathological fear of hypodermic needles—no doubt a carryover from time spent in field hospitals during the Lost Cause. The other advised Jonesy of what they needed in the way of cotton batting, strips of linen and staves to construct a temporary splint. They removed Jess' boots before swelling could set in and yanked off his britches before setting to work at their end. Jonesy cleaned up the other end, putting five small, neat stitches in Jess' forehead right at the hairline above the left eye before dabbing at the myriad other abrasions caused by being dragged over road gravel.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _On a good day, when his back wasn't ailing him so, Jonesy could've handled first aid on his own—he had the know-how. As it was, he didn't have the strength to pull off a sock, much less pull a leg straight. And he didn't have any morphine, either. He'd been meaning to replenish his cache of opiates from his favorite general store on his next shopping trip but hadn't got around to it yet.)_

 **Meanwhile, Mose and the** fourth passenger had busied themselves replacing Off Wheel with another horse not favoring a front leg and carrying buckets of water around to each of the others. With the team growing restive in the afternoon sun and Jess showing signs of returning to the land of the living, there was nothing more to be done here. Mose and his four transportees departed for Laramie, leaving Jonesy alone with our victim of unfortunate circumstance.

Mose promised to find their family doctor as soon as they got to town, which he did although Doctor Whatleigh wasn't immediately available, being up to his elbows in a difficult breech birth. (We won't go there but you'll be happy to hear that Mrs. Holmes was safely delivered of triplets and the doctor only slightly delayed by having to resuscitate Preacher Holmes who had fainted.)

We leave this chapter with an anxious Jonesy worrying where in hell Slim and Andy were and when in hell they'd be coming home, and a groggy Jess wondering what in hell happened and why in hell he was hurting from head to toe.


	4. Chapter 4

_CHAPTER FOUR—PART ONE_

 **THROW DOWN YOUR SOAP!**

" _ **The best weapon is the one that's to hand."**_ _(Afghan proverb)_

 **Later that afternoon...** With his back to the bank, Kim didn't notice Slim's approach. Scooter did, though, lifting his head and whickering, drawing answering whinnies from the two horses on the road above plus a desolate moo from the cow. _So much for the stealth approach_ , Slim thought, bringing the rifle into position and cocking it. The sharp clack echoed across the sudden stillness.

"You there... turn around and come out with your hands up!" No sooner was the command out of his mouth when he realized how ridiculous that must sound. _What's he gonna do, shoot me with a fish?_

Kim turned around slowly, not holding his hands up exactly... more like just a little way from his sides. Had he been on dry land, clothed and wearing a gunbelt, he would have appeared poised to draw and Slim might've drilled him in a New York minute. As it was, he was armed with only a bar of soap.

For a very long minute they stared each other down. Kim remained unmoving with his head tilted slightly to one side, as though in polite expectation of receiving further orders. Suds and bubbles slowly cascaded from his head to his navel, gathering like a tutu around his hips. Slim cast about for something that wouldn't sound totally inane. 'Throw down your soap!' didn't have a properly authoritative ring to it. The best he could come up with was "This is private property. Didn't you see the sign up there?" Then he sneezed.

"What do you think you're doing?" Slim demanded irritably, then… when Kim didn't respond, "What's wrong with you? Are you deaf? Can't you read?"

Kim's traumatized and narcotized brain had geared down to 'idle'. His first thought, seeing the tall man standing thirty feet away on dry ground, was... _oh good, I'm saved!_ His second thought, realizing he was looking up the business end of a rifle, was... _oh shit, I'm dead!_ Having a directive, a declarative and five sequential interrogatives thrown at him in rapid succession was more than he could rationally process... effectively rendering him mentally constipated. He'd understood what he'd heard, of course, but the appropriate responses were locked inside his head. He was literally struck dumb. And soap was running into his eyes.

"I said... come out of there!" Slim motioned with the rifle, not understanding why anyone with any sense of self-preservation wouldn't by now be exhibiting apprehension. Instead, Kim slowly submerged, emerging soap-free a few moments later and giving Slim a clearer picture of who... or rather what... he had at gunpoint: a very young man of color with a very badly bruised torso.

 **Slim noticed the young fellow's focus** had shifted to something behind him and then he heard Andy's voice off to his left...

"Slim... I..."

"I told you stay on the road. Go back."

"But Slim... oh... hi..." Andy suddenly saw there was a third party present. "I'm Andy Sherman. This here's my brother Slim but don't worry, he won't shoot you. Well, not until you got your clothes on, anyway..."

"Now wait a minute...!" Slim interjected, feeling the situation slipping out of his control. He wanted this intruder off his property, sooner the better. "How many times do I have to..." he started to say before it occurred to him that the young man might actually _be_ deaf. He pointed at him and then to the bank, using exaggerated motions to indicate he was to come out of the water. "Out!"

Kim shrugged and started to move, not realizing that by now his lower half was hypothermically numbed and no longer under voluntary motor control. When he fell face forward that slick bar of soap squirted right out of his hand and sailed in a parabolic arc in Andy's direction. When Andy tried to catch it, it cannonballed right back out of _his_ hand on a dead trajectory toward Slim's forehead where it impacted solidly between the eyes.

Slim yelled, caught his heel on a tree root and fell backward into a mud puddle. When he hit the ground his finger spasmodically clutched the trigger and fired the weapon, taking out one of three buzzards circling hopefully overhead. The blasted raptor pranged into the lake with a mighty splash as the canyon walls reverberated with echoes. At the gunshot Scooter neighed hysterically and catapulted himself out of the water. Bolting directly to the nearest greasewood bush, he plugged his head firmly into the depths of the spiny branches while the rest of him remained spraddle-legged outside of it, quivering in terror with the wet shirt and denims still clinging to his back.

 **For several seconds no one moved.** Andy's moment of fright passed and he tried without success to stifle the bubble of laughter he could feel welling up inside. Slim leaped up and danced around, cussing a blue streak and scrubbing at his burning soap-blurred eyes with his bandanna. Kim was doubled over with both arms wrapped tightly around his belly, choking from the second, unpremeditated immersion and trying unsuccessfully to keep from laughing because it hurt so much.

By the time the stinging in Slim's eyes abated and his vision cleared, so had most of his anger. He could even appreciate—marginally—the comic aspects of their situation. He would have appreciated it better if his head wasn't pounding. He picked up and inspected his rifle, useless now until he cleaned the gunk out of breech and barrel.

Andy was the first one to recover fully. He'd laughed the loudest and longest until snot was running out of his nose. As he was lifting one sleeved arm, Slim shot him a warning look. "Don't even think about it! Where's your bandanna?"

"Don't got it."

" ' _Haven't got it'_... not _'don't'_."

"Aw, Slim..."

"As for you..." Slim returned his attention to the trespasser, forgetting that only a few minutes ago he'd thought the boy couldn't hear. He made the universal one-finger come-here gesture. "Out..."

Kim nodded in assent before laboriously wading onto the bank, balancing with one arm and holding the other arm tight to his body... which was when Slim realized with a frisson of alarm that his dark complexion—as golden-brown as maple syrup except for the bruises wrapped across his midsection and right arm—wasn't just a deep suntan but extended all the way south. And because Kim's hair was wet it appeared much darker, straighter and longer than it would later, when dry and restored to its natural curl.

 **Compared to most of his contemporaries** , Slim Sherman was unusually tolerant of non-Caucasians and 'people of color'... even had a few he counted as 'friends'. Privately, he struggled with acceptance issues regarding individuals of mixed white and Indian heritage. He was, after all a product of his upbringing and environment—as was almost every other white man in the territory old enough to remember what life was like before the redskins were mostly pacified and forcibly relocated to reservations. What few so-called 'wild' Indians remained in the hills—those who'd managed to evade cavalry troops—were tolerated so long as they kept to their own stomping grounds and didn't cause trouble.

Halfbreed Indians were another matter. A part-white child was very often assimilated into the tribe of his native parent, his ethnicity making no practical difference to people who valued all their children equally. It rarely worked the other way around, however—especially when the native parent was for whatever reason separated from his or her people. White folks rarely adopted 'breeds, much less welcomed them into their society. And those unfortunates, outcasts with no place and no future in either place, too often turned to savagery as adults. At least, those were the prevailing beliefs and attitudes in that time and place.

Slim'd sooner deal with a full-blooded brave of any stripe than a 'breed. This one, though not as dark as some, was still a shade or two outside of Slim's comfort zone.

With as much dignity as he could muster, Kim started moving toward his saddlebags and his one change of clothing but Slim barred his way with the unusable rifle held sideways.

"Hold on there... Andy... go over there and get his guns..."

Andy ran over and squatted down, checking both saddlebags and the warbag and bedroll.

"Ain't no... aren't any, Slim..."

"Are you sure? Look again..."

"Nope... no guns... just two knives..."

"Take 'em and stand away from him..."

"Why?"

"Just do as I say..." Slim gestured to his captive to move along after Andy had complied and was standing off to the side examining the engraved flourishes on the throwing knife.

Seeing how difficult it was for Kim to bend down to his saddlebag, Andy immediately put both knives down and moved to assist, overriding Slim's objection.

"He's hurt, Slim... can't you see?" But before his brother could respond, Andy was immediately distracted by that even more interesting image on this new person's back. Andy knew what tattoos were... had seen illustrations in picture books and what appeared to be abstract designs on Indians... but he'd only once seen one on a white person (he hadn't yet made the halfbreed connection) and that certainly hadn't looked like this.

"Wow! What's _that?!_ " he exclaimed in awe, reaching out to touch it.

"Not now..." Slim warned. "Leave him alone."

"Why don't... doesn't... he talk, Slim?"

"I don't know, Andy... maybe he doesn't understand our language... or maybe he's mute."

Naturally the saddlebag containing Kim's one change of clothing was the one that had been bogside down. Awkwardly struggling into wet denims with his back to them, Kim was trying to round up his scattered thoughts like a dog chasing chickens. He didn't know these people, could only trust they weren't out to harm him, otherwise the taller one—possibly the father of the teenager though he didn't look quite old enough—would've already blown him away. He'd no idea why words wouldn't come to him. That he'd lost the power of speech—temporarily, he hoped—was almost more troubling than the waves of discomfort nudging aside the narcotic barrier and threatening to burst into the disabling pain he knew was returning. As it was, he had to sit down on the log to catch his breath before even attempting to get his boots on.

 **Younger brother looked toward older brother** with that beseeching expression which meant 'Can I keep it?'—which Slim knew only too well from all the times Andy'd come home with some injured critter. "You ain't... aren't gonna shoot him, are ya, Slim?"

Slim had untangled the dun pony from the greasewood bush and was walking it around in a circle, noting with disapproval the damaged knees and chest.

"No, I'm not going to shoot him. And I'm not going to make him move on, either. This pony's in no condition to be ridden."

"Slim?"

"Yeah... what, Andy?"

"We gotta take 'em home with us... they're hurt... we can't just leave 'em here. It's gonna rain!" Andy's face was screwed up in urgent appeal.

"Well... yes, but..." Slim pondered Jess' and Jonesy's reactions to his dragging in a half-grown halfbreed. Neither would be overjoyed at his bringing potential trouble into the home and he had to admit to himself he wasn't too keen on the idea, either.

Slim was startled when Kim stepped in front of him and started signing and pointing to the pony. Slim didn't follow verbatim but he had enough of a smattering of sign language that the message was clear enough: _Don't worry about me but please take care of my horse._

 _CHAPTER FOUR—PART TWO_

 **DOING WHAT'S RIGHT**

" _ **Laws control the lesser man—right conduct controls the greater one."**_ _(Chinese proverb)_

 **A few minutes after that...** Slim was faced with a moral dilemma... compassion versus common sense. It was important that he make the right decision—not only for the safety of his family but on account of his responsibility to present, whenever and wherever possible, an unequivocal example of Christian servant leadership for the younger brother who worshipped him... _or used to_ , he remembered with a twinge, before Jess had come along and supplanted him in Andy's affections.

 _Do unto others._ Painfully-gained knowledge advised Slim that good intentions and blind adherence to the Golden Rule too often come back to bite you on the ass. Common sense dictated that the least troublesome solution would be to go on about his business, take care of the injured horse and leave the kid to camp for the night right where he was. Incapacitation could be easily faked. Why chance an unknown entity at large in their home, where they could all be murdered in their beds by a miraculously recuperated halfbreed bent on mischief? Although that was highly unlikely, considering the physical manifestations of injury he'd just witnessed. Those contusions were quite real in every possible aspect.

Compassion argued that he couldn't leave an injured human unaided. To do so might make himself a safer man, but it would also make him a lesser one. And there was something else...

Slim had fairly accurate instincts when it came to sizing up the saddle tramps who'd turned up on the ranch with depressing regularity over the past four years—the homeless detritus of war, mostly. He had no compunction about using force if necessary to move them along. In many cases he'd felt genuinely sorry for them and had even offered short-term employment to a few. In general, though, they weren't the kind of men who could be entirely trusted, or that you'd want to have around an impressionable young lad like Andy—men just like Jess Harper.

Only once had Slim's instinct steered him wrong... and that was when he'd first encountered the belligerent drifter who now shared their home. There'd been something indefinably different about the man that compelled the rancher to change his mind after initially dismissing him as just another hopeless, homeless stray... which of course Jess sort of was. Instead, he'd offered the man an opportunity to settle, to put down roots... and that had been—and was continuing to be—one of the best decisions he'd ever made. Most of the time, anyway. Jess still had moments that would make angels weep.

 **Halfbreed or not** , the boy's concern for his horse ahead of his own welfare showed character. He deserved help and Jonesy and Jess would just have to like it or lump it. Besides, it was the right thing to do. Now understanding that the young man could indeed hear and understand even if he couldn't speak, Slim said, "We need to get going. Can you walk?"

Kim nodded affirmatively though doubting how far he'd actually be able to go before delayed shock overrode the diminishing drug in his system. His hands shook as he tried in vain to do up the buttons on his shirt, finally giving up. It was taking all the remaining strength and concentration he possessed just to stay on his feet.

Slim and Andy gathered up Kim's gear, slinging it along with the uncinched saddle on the pony's back. They took the long way around to get back up to the road, following the shore and turning up through a thin scrim of trees where the incline was gentler and the going easier. Slim led the way with the pony while Andy walked alongside Kim, lending a steadying hand whenever he stumbled. In the meantime the boy kept up a running commentary on whatever flew into his mind, including an alarmingly detailed description of his best friend—their famous (or rather, infamous) resident gunfighter Jess Harper, quickest draw in Wyoming. Not something Kim was particularly thrilled to hear about.

Slim hadn't needed to ask what'd happened, as that had been plain to see... not so much from the condition of the pony but that of its rider, whose ribs were more than likely broken rather than just bruised. He was fortunate not to have broken legs or a crushed chest or pelvis, which most assuredly would have been the case had the accident occurred on a hard surface rather than the more forgiving bog. Probably the time spent partly submerged in icy water had retarded some of the immediate aftereffects of trauma.

Cracked ribs were nothing Slim hadn't seen before, or experienced himself. Broken bones were a common hazard among those who rode the range and worked livestock—painful and debilitating but not usually life-threatening. However, it could be days before symptoms of internal injury showed themselves. Slim had more than a nodding acquaintance with the effects of delayed shock on wartime casualties. One evening you could be playing checkers with a soldier convalescing from a relatively mild injury and the next day helping carry his casket.

Sometimes you just had to go with your gut... and this was one of them. Slim wasn't aware that in his mind the word 'trespasser' had already morphed into 'guest'.


	5. Chapter 5

_CHAPTER FIVE—PART ONE_

 **AN HISTORICAL INTERLUDE**

" _ **To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root."**_ _(Chinese proverb)_

 _ **Nonie's advisory...**_ _Y'all can skip this part as technically it ain't part of our story and a lot of it's already documented over at the Laramie Historical Society's headquarters, if any of you are ever of a mind to spend a million hours porin' over dusty genealogical records. But it's kinda interestin' how the characters you're about to meet are related—socially and biologically—to our core group._

 _See, back in the mid-1700s they was all immigrants what arrived in the port of Philadelphia and lived in Pennsylvania for a while before sinkin' roots in the Waxhaws Settlement in the Carolinas—the Whatleighs and the Johnsons from England, the Joneses from Wales, the Smiths and the Harpers from Scotland by way of Ireland, the Schirrmans from Germany and so on and so forth. They started marryin' up with one another as folks did in them days when nobody didn't travel too far from home. Eventually ('bout a hundred years later) they'd done run outta elbow room and people to marry what weren't already related, so they started branchin' out. The Whatleighs moved to Charleston, South Carolina. The Joneses went to Bloomington, Indiana. The Harpers and the Smiths headed off to Virginia soon as their periods of indentured servitude was up and from there to Texas. The Schirrmans remained in Pennsylvania for a while before makin' up their minds to try their luck out west._

 _Eighteen and forty-three was the year of the first great migration westward, and on one of them early wagon trains headin' outta St. Louie, the followin' families was reunited. They was listed on the manifest thusly:_

 _ **Whatleigh Family**_ _—Frederick, 35, physician & widower; daughter Sally Whatleigh, 5; son Wilfred Whatleigh, 3; sister Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo, 33, educator & widow; son Luca Giancomo, 3; Peach McNutt, 33, cook/housekeeper & widow; son Lindsay McNutt, 3._

 _ **Schirrman Family**_ _(later changed to Sherman)—Matthew Sr., 40, farmer; wife Mary Grace (neé Johnson), 28, educator; son Matthew Jr., 1._ (Matthew Sr. was originally from Kutztown, Pennsylvania and Mary Grace was a transplanted Ohioan.)

 _ **Jones Family**_ _—Jebediah, 33, educator; wife Elizabeth, 28; daughter Alice, 8._

 _These three families originally took up land in Oregon's Willamette Valley, but in 1847 the Shermans and Joneses relocated to a settlement in southeastern Wyoming near what twenty-one years later would become the town of Laramie. The elder Whatleighs moved to Sutter's Fort at Sacramento and later to San Franciso before rejoinin' their friends in the Laramie area in 1855 while the younger Whatleighs was away at boardin' schools. In the summer of 1869 a myocardial infarction ushered Old Doc outta this world and into the next—not at home and not in his own bed, but that's another story. His son Wilfred elected to cut short his residency in Honolulu in order to take up his daddy's practice in Laramie._

 _Fast-forwardin' to 1870, we get to Young Doctor Whatleigh and his A-Team... his brigade a caregivers and emergency management personnel. You'll be meetin' 'em pretty soon...)_

 _CHAPTER FIVE—PART TWO_

 **ADVENTURES IN FRONTIER MEDICINE**

" _ **Faith and knowledge lean largely upon each other in the practice of medicine."**_ _(Peter Mere Latham)_

 **Around about the same time...** Jonesy had been pacing the front porch in rising anxiety, worrying that the storm would get here before his boys did. Whatever was keeping them, it couldn't be good. He tried hard to banish from his head the specter of something having happened to Andy. The last rays of sunshine were winking out behind the advancing cloud bank as Doctor Wilfred Whatleigh unfolded his considerable bulk from the seat of his spanking new imported Amish-built buggy. From the cargo bay he produced his battered black physician's case, a disreputable Gladstone bag and a locked wooden medicine chest.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's mini-bio re our doctor...**_ _Wilfred 'Freddy' Whatleigh—more commonly known as 'Young Doc'—was a bear of a man, taller and broader than Slim though you couldn't have pinched an inch anywhere on him, with mournful coffee-brown eyes under a mop of brown curls in dire need of a trim. Had he been born a decade or two later, he no doubt would have been the star quarterback of Harvard's athletic department's nascent football team—if he'd gone there instead of attending the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston._

 _Freddy Whatleigh aspired to follow in his father's footsteps as a country doctor in family practice, but Old Doc had higher aims for his only son—foreseeing a brilliant career as an acclaimed surgical specialist in one of the nation's up-and-coming urban medical institutions. Freddy therefore went off to Scotland to pursue postgraduate studies in advanced surgical techniques at the University of Edinburgh. At the conclusion of his formal studies, he interned at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco and was subsequently offered a residency at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu._

 _Although life on the island of Oahu was pleasant and Freddy was on track to become head of surgery at Queen's, both he and his wife were homesick for their respective families on the mainland. Then Freddy's sister sent word of the old man's demise in a single, terse telegram: 'FATHER DEAD STOP GP NEEDED HERE STOP COME HOME'. Three weeks later Freddy and Pearl and their infant son were on a Pacific Mail steamer bound for San Francisco. Three weeks after that Doctor Wilfred Whatleigh took up his father's general practice in Laramie, Wyoming, where he soon acquired the sobriquet 'Young Doc' to distinguish him from his late daddy 'Old Doc' [Alfred Whatleigh, also known as Freddy]._

 _Young Doc soon found that country doctoring in the Wild West was a far cry from practicing in Charleston, South Carolina. True, he did his fair share of patching up injuries, delivering babies, dispensing medications and treating diseases and ailments he'd only read about in medical school, but on the frontier—with no hospitals and limited access to pharmaceuticals—few of his patients lived long enough to succumb to old age or other natural causes. Adults who managed to live to twenty had an average life expectancy somewhat short of sixty. The community doctor was not only healer but counselor, pathologist, psychologist, peacemaker, confessor, sage, oracle, confidante, messenger, advisor, provider of social services, handyman and sometime veterinarian all rolled into one. Oftimes it was up to the doctor, encountering an isolated family in dire straits, to rally assistance from civic and religious organizations or neighbors able and willing to lend a hand. However, he'd never found himself embroiled in a situation quite like the one in which he was about to step...)_

" **Am I glad to see you, Freddy!"** Jonesy exclaimed. "Did Mose...?"

"He told me. Sorry I was delayed." Young Doc explained about the triplets as they headed to the porch. Seeing that Jonesy was hobbling and had to use the handrail to negotiate the steps, Young Doc asked if his back was bothering him again. The older man admitted it was one of his more severe attacks of 'sacroiliac' and that he'd hardly been able to get out of bed that morning.

"Where's the rest of the crew? I'm gonna be here a while, maybe all night. Fancy should go in the barn before the rain starts." (Fancy being Young Doc's Standardbred mare that he was right proud of.) "I'll be needing some assistance, too."

Jonesy told him about the cow safari, complaining that Slim and Andy should've been back by now and adding that his back was in such bad shape he didn't think he could be of much use to the doctor at the moment. He was grateful that Mose and the fourth passenger had gone ahead and unharnessed the incoming horses and turned them out to pasture while waiting for the first response team to finish its work in the house.

"No problem. Let me have a quick look at the patient and I'll go put 'er up myself." Ducking to enter the front door, Young Doc set his things on the parlor table before pulling up a chair alongside the fainting couch to make a preliminary assessment.

"Damned fool should've known better..." Young Doc liked Jess just fine but took a dim view of the man's propensity for accruing physical damages. "He's out of it, sure enough. What and how much have you given him so far?" Young Doc had no illusions where Jess Harper was concerned, having had to call in reinforcements while treating him in the past.

Jonesy explained how, after the morphine had worn off, Jess had moaned until Jonesy's ears were about to fall off. By then he was thinking pillow over the face but instead had offered coffee liberally laced with laudanum which Jonesy hoped would lower the decibel rate until the doctor arrived, anyway. The last dose had been less than an hour ago... "but that was the last of it... I don't have any more..."

Complimenting Jonesy on his stitchery, Young Doc said, "You should take up tatting lace." Inspecting the temporary splint, he commented, "I don't care what side those old boys fought on, they did a damned fine job here. Too bad I'm going to have to undo it."

"He might have a couple of broke fingers on his right hand," Jonesy said. "He's probably gonna be madder about that than about his leg..."

Young Doc unwrapped Jess' hand and flexed fingers and wrist. "Nothing broken, but might have some pulled tendons or ligaments, which is almost as bad." He rewrapped the hand, stood up and went over to the capacious Gladstone, delving into its depths and coming up with a large tin labeled 'Plaster of Paris.' Being a forward-thinking modernist, the doctor prided himself on keeping up-to-date on all the latest medical methodologies and technologies. He gave Jonesy a brief explanation of orthopedic plaster casting and a shortlist of preps Jonesy could get started on.

"We'll need a tub of warm water and a clean bedsheet, cut into six-inch by twenty-four-inch strips." The contents of the tin—calcined gypsum powder—were to be mixed in the tub with water in proportions listed on the label and stirred until it achieved the consistency of pancake batter. "But save that until I come back in because we don't want it setting up too quickly. Then we'll put those strips into the mixture and poke 'em around with a wooden spoon until they're saturated. We'll need some more of that cotton batting..."

With regard to Jess' knee-length undies, Doc shook his head. "Gotta come off now or they'll have to be cut off later... just throw a towel over him for decency's sake! You keep an eye on him while I'm outside... if he starts stirring, gimme a holler. I'll come in and give him an injection. I don't want him moving that leg." With that Young Doc turned toward the exit, smacking his forehead on the lintel. "Dammit!"

 **Jonesy hobbled into the kitchen** to stoke up the stove and set pots and kettles of water to boil. Just about the time he was done cutting up strips and Jess was starting to make wake-up noises, Young Doc came clomping back in with a double armload of kindling, remembering to duck this time. While he washed up he and Jonesy held a whispered consultation in the kitchen as to how much more sedative could safely be applied without overdosing the patient. "Once I get started I can't stop—that plaster probably sets up pretty quickly. We'd best load him up good so he stays conked out for a couple of hours."

With the tub of plaster goop and strips ready to carry into the parlor, Young Doc advised Jonesy to spread a few old blankets on the floor of the operating theater as plastering was likely to be a messy business. "Which means we're gonna be plastered our ownselves. I suggest we peel down to our skivvies. You might want to put that derby of yours out of harm's way, too."

Back in the parlor Jess had come to but promptly passed out again after taking one look at the hypodermic needle the doctor was pulling out of his black bag. Young Doc changed his mind and opted to go with chloroform instead, showing Jonesy how to apply a few drops to a folded towel.

"But..."

"It's not that difficult, Jonesy..." Young Doc chuckled. "You watch him... if he twitches an eyelash, hold the towel over his mouth and nose until he stops... just not until he stops breathing. But first, let me check for any other damages."

Other than minor road rash that needed sponging off, Young Doc couldn't find anything else of consequence, so—with Jess modestly sheeted from neck to thigh and another straightback chair brought up for Jonesy—they were ready to start.

After removing the leg splints, Young Doc thanked grace and good fortune he wasn't having to deal with a compound fracture. He started probing from the ankle up and again from the knee down. "Did you know this leg's been broken before?"

"Seem to recall him telling about that... but how would you know?"

"I can feel it. There's a slight bulge in the shaft here, right above the ankle, that shouldn't be there. It appears to have been a non-displaced simple transverse fracture that healed cleanly although the join is offset just a smidgen. Whoever did the reduction did a good job otherwise. I don't recall ever seeing Jess limping."

"He does sometimes, when he's real tired," Jonesy volunteered. "Did it break in the same place?"

"No... this new one's about four inches below the knee and it's an oblique displaced fracture, see...?" Young Doc demonstrated with his fingers how the bone had cracked at an angle with the two ends slightly offset and overlapped. "Your medics got it almost right but not quite, so we're gonna take care of that right now. What I need you to do, Jonesy, is hold his knee steady."

It takes consummate skill and an almost extrasensory tactile ability to manipulate what you cannot see, and Jonesy shivered at the audible scrunch as bones slotted into place. "There, that oughta do it."

"How many times have you done this, Freddy?" Jones asked.

"Set a broken leg? More times than I can remember..."

"I meant using this plaster stuff."

"Counting this time? Let me see... um... once?... but how hard can it be?" Young Doc replied with confidence, exuberantly fishing out a soggy strip of linen and in the process flinging driblets of plaster on everything within range. As he held cotton batting in place so that Young Doc could start laying in the strips, Jonesy gloomily considered how much elbow grease would be required to scrape dried plaster off walls and furniture.

 **Jonesy had known Freddy** since he was a tadpole and got along with him just as famously as he had with Freddy's daddy Alfred, also known as Freddy, whom he greatly missed. Young Doc was well aware he had a valuable resource in Mister Jones' experiences in pioneer medicine. Every chance he got he came by to pick Jonesy's brains for arcane recipes known to settlers' wives and natives but unheard of in the hallowed halls of academe. He subscribed to the _New England Journal of Medicine_ and passed along old copies to his friend.

They chatted as Young Doc worked, mostly about advances in medical care in general and Jonesy's ongoing sacroiliac problems. Young Doc advised Jonesy to try sleeping on his side with a small pillow between his knees or else flat on his back with two plump pillows beneath his knees, promising he'd find _some_ relief that way. He also recommended a week of complete bedrest, which Jonesy replied was an impossibility.

"Have it your own way, old man," Young Doc shrugged, "but keep this up and you'll soon be in a pushchair. In any case, from what you're describing it sounds more like muscle strain. Liniment and a hot compress'll help a little if you take it easy for a few days... do a little work, then rest for a while."

"Looks like I'm not gonna have time for that, either," said Jonesy, looking on attentively as a big white chrysalis began to take shape, and with a great deal of dismay as gobbets of gluey plaster congealed on the walls and the blankets underfoot grew sodden.

"By the way," Doc said, "do you recall if Andy's ever had the measles?"

"Pretty sure he hasn't."

"How about you and Slim and Jess?"

"I know _I_ did, and I recall Mary Grace saying something one time about Slim having them. Wouldn't know about Jess. Why?"

Doc explained that traffic at the clinic had been steadily increasing all week—a stream of worried mothers with snuffling, feverish young ones. "Could be the influenza, of course... but I'm betting measles, in which case we'll have an epidemic on our hands shortly. Just to be on the safe side, try to limit contact with any stage passengers or any other travelers stopping by. If you do have to let them in, be sure to wash anything they've handled in hot soapy water. Don't let anyone into the house if he or she looks sick or is sneezing, and don't stand too close. If anyone just has to shake your hand, wash up with carbolic right away. Don't go into town unless you absolutely have to and don't, under any circumstances, take Andy with you. For the next week at least. I'll keep you posted."

Jonesy promised he'd follow Young Doc's instructions.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's notes...**_ _Measles was just one of the scores of communicable diseases what killed folks back then, children an' adults alike. It can still kill you now if you happen to live in one of them third-world countries... an' Wyoming in them days was pretty much third-world compared to the more civilized areas of the nation. Doctors didn't yet know exactly how measles an' a lot of them other ailments was passed on an' there wasn't really much could be done other than provide palliative care for the stricken. City kids usually got the measles an' everything else going around at an earlier age than kids in rural communities. An' for some reason the older you were, the harder it hit you an' the more likely you was to develop complications an' D.I.E. from it. All it took was one sneeze from an infected person in your personal space an' next thing you knew you'd be et up with measle cooties.)_


	6. Chapter 6

_CHAPTER SIX—PART ONE_

 **EMERGENCY ROOM ANTICS**

" _ **The probability that something can go wrong is directly proportional to the square of the amount of inconvenience it can cause you."**_ _(Takura Razemba)_

 **Early evening...** Jonesy had been periodically stepping out on the porch to check the road and his vigilance was finally rewarded. His heart thumped in relief when the unlikely cortège hove into sight, advancing down the stage road at the speed of one sullen cow and one lame pony. He walked out into the gathering gloom to meet them, oblivious to the raindrops pinging the dust in the yard and rumbles of thunder in the distance.

Alamo led with one sagging figure in the saddle being kept more or less upright by Slim riding pillion. The saddled but riderless pony limped along behind. Bringing up the rear was Andy on Traveler, literally dragging the desperate cow whose distended udder hadn't been relieved since that morning. Questions would have to wait.

Slim and Andy dismounted. Slim told Andy to attend to the cow first and give the milk to the orphan calves, that he'd be back out in a few minutes to take care of the horses. Andy nodded and led Deecy away, the cow showing no inclination to disagree. Turning to Jonesy and seeing the anxiety and unvoiced question there, Slim patted him on the shoulder. "We're both fine... just tired and wet and hungry. He did a real man's job today and I'm sure proud of him! I'll send him back in soon as..."

"Slim, I've got something..." Jonesy started to say.

"Hope what you've got is something hot on the stove—we haven't eaten since..."

"Slim, there's something you..."

"Say, what are you doing in your underwear?"

"About supper..." Jonesy said loudly just as Slim noticed the buggy standing off to the side, his eyes narrowing and his grin fading.

"Isn't that...?"

"He's in the parlor with Jess." From the look on Jonesy's face Slim knew it was bad news.

"What happened?" As Jonesy briefed him on the accident, his gut reaction was to race into the house. Jonesy laid a restraining hand on Slim's arm as if reading his mind and understanding his alarm for the welfare of one who was coming to be as close as a brother.

"No use you charging in there like a bull in a china shop, Slim," he said quietly. "Doc's taking good care, as usual..."

"How bad?" Slim wanted to know but was afraid of the answer.

"Bad enough... but he'll be okay... eventually, Doc says."

Slim unleashed a string of cursewords. Jonesy sought to distract him by nodding toward Alamo whose cargo was leaning precipitously to starboard. "Whatcha got there?"

Slim had forgotten about his passenger. "Just another illiterate hard-luck drifter we pulled outta the water at the Choke..."

No further explanation was needed. This wasn't the first incident... except that the bodies recovered from the lake were usually stiffer and colder. "Better get him inside then, before we all drown," Jonesy said. The rain was coming down harder now.

 **Just inside the door,** Slim paused to take in the scene, shaking his head in disbelief. The entire southwest corner of the parlor looked like an explosion in a whitewash factory. The tufted-leather fainting couch—their usual triage post for incoming casualties—had been pulled away from its slot between the door and the fireplace to afford access to either side. Jonesy normally kept it covered with an old Indian blanket to hide the stains where a lot of folks had bled and some few had died. Currently it was occupied by Jess with a bandaged head and hand and a leg in the process of being mummified.

Overflowing the straightback chair on which he sat in his underwear, Young Doc turned his head as they entered, holding up two dripping hands. "Hey there, Slim! Good of you to stop by now that we're almost done!" He looked like a potter gone berserk, with plaster in his hair and all over his longjohns. Now that Slim had enough light to see by he realized Jonesy and Jess were similarly decorated.

Young Doc eyed the shivering, bedraggled figure sandwiched between Slim and Jonesy. It wasn't _that_ cold outside. "What's his problem?"

"Horse rolled on him," Slim answered tersely. "Broken ribs, looks like. Found him in the Hourglass Lake..."

"Hmnnn... well..." Young Doc waved a hand in the general direction of the rest of the room, sprinkling droplets as he gestured. "Can't stop now. Just put him down over there somewhere... gently, if you please... get his duds off first and wrap him up in a coupla blankets. I'll get to him soon's I can."

Maneuvering the new arrival to the back of the room, Slim and Jonesy stripped his clothes off, wrapped a quilt around him and stretched him out on the horsehair sofa where he lay unmoving, eyes closed. Having seen the ugly discolorations on the boy's torso and assuming he was now passed out, Jonesy shook his head. "He won't make it to sunup."

"Maybe not," Slim said, "but we'll do what we can for him anyway."

"Halfbreed?" Jonesy queried unnecessarily.

"Looks to be."

"Who is he?" Jonesy whispered.

"No idea," Slim whispered back. "Hasn't said a word since we found him. Not deaf, though... understands what you tell him. Don't know if he's mute or just one round shy of a full cylinder."

They returned to the front of the room where with a grim face Slim studied the cocoon on Jess' leg from above the knee to below the ankle. "Is that... whatever it is... is that gonna work?"

Young Doc was smoothing down the last strip. "It's called an orthopedic plaster cast and I certainly hope so... or else I've gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. Look, Slim, I'm not gonna lie to you... or him when he wakes up. It's a bad break. There's no reason for infection to set in, since the skin's not broken, but there's always that possibility."

"But will he be all right?" Slim insisted. "He's not gonna lose his leg, is he?"

"Hope not... a lot depends on keeping him off of it long enough to give it a chance to heal. Offhand, I'd say three to four months."

Jonesy was shaking his head dolefully. "I don't see how we'll be able to keep him down that long."

"You and Slim'll have to figure it out. If he walks on it too soon he'll be crippled for the rest of his life. In the meantime," Young Doc continued dryly, "I recommend the two of you consider taking up drinking... serious drinking."

"What about...?" Slim inquired, pointing a finger to his own temple.

Doc scoffed. "This knucklehead? That's the least of your worries!"

Young Doc stood up and stretched, his fingertips grazing the ceiling. "When that last layer's dry enough we'll move him to his own bed... another hour or so. He should be waking up soon but he'll be woozy and probably won't make too much sense. The best thing'll be to keep him doped up until tomorrow."

He narrowed his eyes at Slim. "What's wrong, Slim? You sound stuffed up and look like hell warmed over."

"I _am_ stuffed up. Probably just a head cold."

"You look a little pale, too," Young Doc insisted. "You feverish?"

"I'm fine. Don't worry about me."

"How'd you get that knot on your forehead?"

"Don't ask!"

"You need to get out of those wet clothes before you go back out... Andy, too, if he's as wet."

"No time... got to put up the horses first."

"Well, all right then. I guess I don't need you for anything right now."

Slim nodded and exited as Young Doc threw another quilt over Jess.

"Jonesy... could you put on a pot of coffee and warm up some more water? It's gonna be a long night."

 _CHAPTER SIX—PART TWO_

 **IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS**

" _ **When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better."**_ _(Malcolm S. Forbes)_

 **Mid-evening...** There remained enough tepid water in the kettles on the stove for Jonesy and Young Doc to wash most of the plaster from their faces and hands. Heat from the fireplace had already mostly dried the plaster on their longjohns. Adding fresh kindling in the firebox, Jonesy put on the coffeepot along with the big pot of mulligan stew he'd started that morning—now stout enough to eat with a fork after having been on standby for hours before the stove went cold. With a little water stirred in it'd be good as new. Almost.

Young Doc busied himself gathering up all the plaster-soaked blankets and discarded clothing and pitching them outside on the front porch. He was adding wood to the fireplace when the front door opened and Andy trudged in. Making straight for the fainting couch, the boy's eyes traveled from Jess' slack face above the bunched-up quilt to the one foot poking out from underneath, the cast visible up to the ankle. When Jonesy came around the corner from the kitchen and took in that face full of dried tears glistening like snail trails in the lamplight, his indignance rose like high tide... what was Slim thinking, sending the child out to the barn instead of straight indoors when it was plain to see he was both exhausted and unwell!

"Hi, Andy," Young Doc said, taking in the youngster's fatigued demeanor, thinking there was more going on here than just worry about his friend.

"Hello, Doctor Fred. Is Jess gonna be all right?"

"Well... yes... but he won't be able to walk for a while. He'll really be depending on you for help." Young Doc felt, rather than saw, Jonesy's disapproval of what he no doubt perceived to be traitorous sentiment. He and Jonesy'd had several discussions lately about what Jonesy deeply believed was an unhealthy attachment of the just-turned-thirteen-years boy to the twenty-six-year-old gunfighter... _former_ gunfighter, Young Doc amended, as if repeating it like a mantra would make it so... that Jess Harper would never again backslide into that violent lifestyle. Young Doc and Slim had also had a similar discussion.

Young Doc had endeavored to assure both adults that this was perfectly normal behavior for adolescent children—especially those raised in stable environments, who had no first-hand experience with growing up poor or disenfranchised... who had no other creative outlets for their fertile imaginations. There was no glamour in absolute freedom to do as one pleased, but children didn't know that and wouldn't until they became adults themselves. Andy would grow out of this hero-worship all in good time, Young Doc promised. And no, it wouldn't do a bit of good to simply send Jess away.

In Young Doc's opinion, Slim's and Jonesy's best course of action would be to focus on taming Jess Harper... making ranch and family life so agreeable that he _chose_ it over his formerly free but far from easy existence. Once Andy understood that Jess had made that decision of his own volition, the whole idea of the Big Open and having a 'reputation' would lose its allure.

'Leadership by example', Young Doc preached... somewhat unnecessarily, as he knew the rancher shared that same principle. Of course, Jess wasn't anywhere close to making that decision yet and Jonesy, although he was coming to like Jess as a person, still viewed him as a pernicious influence and at times privately wished he'd move on. He wanted life to return to the way things were before, when the younger brother emulated the older one—as it should be.

Jonesy cut in, fussing over Andy's damp, dirty condition and the fact that he hadn't eaten anything since that morning. "Come in here and wash up, son, then go put on your nightshirt. Stew'll be warm by then. Your brother's gonna get a piece of my mind when he comes in!"

"It's okay, Jonesy... I ain't hungry. And Slim didn't make me help him... I volunteered. Doctor Fred, I think Slim's sick... real sick."

"Sick in what way, Andy?" Young Doc asked.

"Like he's got the worst cold ever... I don't want him to be sick... and Jess has a broke leg... and I... I..." Just like that, Andy burst into tears.

"We shoulda been here!" the boy wailed. "It's my fault! If Deecy hadn't got out Slim woulda been here... Jess wouldn't a got hurt! Slim wouldn't a got sick!"

Jonesy moved to put his arms around the boy—now almost as tall as himself, patting him ineffectually on the back. "Now, now... don't take on so, Andy... it wasn't your fault... accidents happen... coulda happened to anyone at any time... And look at it this way: If you and Slim'd hadn't a been out chasing that cow today then that boy over there probably woulda died." Jonesy nodded his head toward the sofa, wisely not adding that its occupant probably wasn't going to make it anyway.

Young Doc, meanwhile, was reaching other conclusions regarding Andy's distress. Flushed, perspiring face. Conjunctivitis. A slight cough and a runny nose. When the torrent of grief had trickled down to hiccups, he sighed and interrupted. "Andy, take your shirt off..." Sure enough, faint pink speckles were blossoming on Andy's forehead, ears and neck.

"Haven't been feeling too well these past few days, have you?"

"No sir."

"Why didn't you tell Slim or Jonesy about it?"

"Didn't wanna worry 'em."

"Bet you're getting itchy, too, eh?"

"Yessir... a little."

"Is that what I think it is?" Jonesy interjected.

"I'm afraid so... young Andy here's coming down with the goddamned measles," the doctor stated grimly.

 **In the kitchen,** Andy was too miserable to complain when Jonesy insisted he take off all his clothes and sponge himself clean, or when Young Doc daubed him with witch hazel and dusted him with talcum powder. After slipping a nightshirt over his head, Andy downed a cup of warmed apple cider laced with a mild dose of laudanum before Jonesy bundled him off to bed.

Young Doc stepped out on the porch to relieve himself, noting that the rain was coming down heavier and there was a hint of autumnal chill in the air. Ten days past the fall equinox the weather was still holding balmy, although it could change in an eyeblink and dive straight into cold and influenza season—the worst possible time for a measles epidemic, especially for the newborn or elderly or those with already-compromised immune systems... such as Jess Harper or Slim Sherman... or the mute mystery kid on the sofa.

Tussling with his conscience, Young Doc tried to convince himself he needed to eat something before seeing to his other patient—a man his size needed regular refueling and he'd missed lunch as well as dinner. The youngster on the sofa was either asleep, unconscious or circling the drain—in any case, there really wasn't much he could do besides administer painkillers. Conscience won. Heaving a sigh of resignation, the doctor returned to the kitchen to wash up yet again.


	7. Chapter 7

_CHAPTER SEVEN—PART ONE_

 **A CURIOUS CONUNDRUM**

" _ **The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water moulds itself to the pitcher."**_ _(Chinese Proverb)_

 **Still mid-evening...** Kim wasn't unconscious, although he wished he were instead of surfing waves of pain. He'd blacked out periodically throughout the ordeal of being manhandled onto and off of the saddle. During the mile and a half trip from the canyon to the ranch house, every footfall of the horse beneath him had sent agonizing jolts through his body, as had being brought indoors, undressed and deposited on a lumpy sofa. The slightest movement slashed through the remnants of the narcotic shield, so he lay perfectly still with his eyes closed against the light from an overhead oil lamp. Even wrapped in the quilt he was still cold and his lungs were demanding a greater intake of air than his short shallow breaths were allowing. How easy would it be to simply stop breathing? His heartbeats pounded in his ears; it was a wonder they couldn't be heard clear across the room. Fleeting watercolor impressions marched through his addled mind like an out-of-focus magic lantern show.

From the exchange between the tall cowboy and the old man outside, he figured he must be in the Sherman residence/relay station (considerably homier than Hickman's squalid abode) which evidently was currently functioning as a hospital as well. The tall man was Slim, the boy was Andy, the old man was Jonesy, the huge man was the doctor—Fred, and the man with the bandages and encasted leg must be Jess-the-gunfighter. Kim repeated the names to himself to fix them in his memory and pondered his immediate future as others seemed to see it...

Would death come to him in the night as that old man had predicted? Up until the event that had forced him to flee his homeland, Kim had assumed (as young people do whenever they happen to contemplate their own mortality) that he would die an old man, at home in his own bed surrounded by loved ones. With matters the way they were, though, he'd been thinking about death an awful lot lately—envisioning more violent scenarios involving bullets or knives. Death by misadventure had not occurred to him. What an ignominious way to go. And poor Scooter... who would look after him... understand and take into consideration his little foibles?

When the light filtering through his eyelids was blotted out, Kim opened his eyes and beheld an approaching behemoth resembling a man only bigger... in his underwear. The giant paused to hook a chair with one finger and plunk it next to the sofa—the doctor, obviously... as he had a stethoscope dangling from his neck. The chair squealed ominously when he sat in it. The older man—the one who'd earlier judged Kim as already at death's door—had come to stand beside him. The doctor was regarding Kim with a not unfamiliar expression—curiosity tinged with puzzlement.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's observations...**_ _In Kim's own world, miscegenation was commonplace and had been for a century, neither immoral nor illegal—just a fact of life. He'd never had to explain himself or his antecedents. In this country, he'd discovered, the frequently unlettered rural populace was attuned to and very much opposed to intrusions into their gene pool of Negro, Native American or Latin American blood. However, they were for the most part unacquainted with other forms of ethnic or racial combinations. Kim suspected there would be questions—just his bad luck to have come up against an individual more educated, more worldly, more observant than the average settler. Moreover, there would be questions for which Kim was reluctant to supply answers... even if his power of speech was miraculously restored.)_

 **The anticipated questions** were already coalescing in Young Doc's mind. When the newcomer had been brought in, the distracted doctor had at first glance dismissed him (as had Slim and Jonesy) as just another local halfbreed, but here—up-close and personal—Young Doc was baffled. Epicanthic eye folds were a common feature in Native Americans, although he'd never met one whose irises were such a peculiar amber color. In New Orleans Young Doc had seen many _café au lait_ Creoles with eyes bronze-gold as tarnished coins, that spoke of Senegalese ancestry. He briefly considered the possibility that his new patient could be an octoroon—a generous mouth and full sensual lips fit the profile, but the fair hair and retroussé nose put the kibosh on that notion.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _In addition to being a general medical practitioner and surgeon of some unorthodoxic renown in the territory, Wilfred Whatleigh was an avid student of_ Homo sapiens _in all its imperfect glory and infinite variety—a wannabe anthropologist. And as a dilettante detective there was nothing he loved better than investigating a genotype/phenotype mystery, although he wouldn't have known those words on account of they hadn't been invented yet and science was still shaky on the subject of genetics. Nature versus nurture was another theory he embraced wholeheartedly. Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Galton were Wilfred Whatleigh's heroes and he hoped he lived long enough to witness the passage of their theories into acceptance as substantiated fact.)_

 **Pointing to himself, Young Doc spoke slowly,** enunciating each syllable clearly. "I am Doctor Whatleigh. What is your name?"

"Slim says he's a dummy..." Jonesy advised.

Young Doc was momentarily taken aback but instantly regained his composure. Perhaps the youngster just didn't understand English. Well, no matter... language barriers were a mere piddling nuisance—many of his patients were recent immigrés who had no English at all or very little. Keeping his face professionally neutral and his voice soothingly modulated, Young Doc continued.

"I'm going to examine you for injuries... do you understand what I'm saying?"

Kim nodded _yes_.

"In a little while I'll give you something to cut the pain and help you sleep, but I can't do that yet because I need you to be awake so you can let me know where you're hurting, okay?"

Kim nodded _yes_ again.

Young Doc had a hunch that this patient might prefer tea to coffee. Turning to Jonesy he asked, "Could you rustle up a pot of tea right quick... the laudanum's still on the kitchen counter. When the tea's ready, put about thirty drops in the cup... and a couple teaspoons of honey."

Young Doc then peeled back the quilt to reveal the polychromatic display underneath— a lividly purple-bruised right arm and a black, blue and purple python snaking diagonally from the right hip across the torso toward the left armpit. As expected, he found no differentiation in natural skin color above and below the beltline.

"Can you show me where it hurts?"

The patient very slowly lifted his injured arm and gestured vaguely toward his chest and belly.

Young Doc always started his exams with a patient's head—no visible injuries there. Pupils were equal and reactive to a lit match. Sclera a healthy bright white as were teeth—all present and accounted for and in excellent condition (something Young Doc didn't see very often) other than some minor misalignment. Extremity reflexes were all intact, suggesting no spinal damage. Shallow respiration and rapid pulse were to be expected but the stethoscope yielded no indication of impaired lung function. The pinch test on the back of the hand revealed a degree of dehydration. Other than minor abrasions and bruises—and damaged ribs—this patient appeared to be in prime health and adequately nourished. He must not have been on the road too long.

Young Doc's trained eye could read a human body like a road map, every distinguishing mark a chapter in a patient's history. The prevalence, location and types of marks on a given individual—taken in conjunction with overall health—guided the doctor's assessment of his lifestyle and probable occupation. He could tell a lot about a man from the condition of his hands and the location of his calluses—for instance, whether he was a cowboy, farmer or rancher... or a gunfighter. This one was none of the above. His hands were too smooth and supple, with little ingrained dirt, and his fingernails too clean and well kept. A deep indentation and light discoloration on his left ring finger indicated that something that had been there a long time had been recently removed.

 _However..._ this patient did sport an inordinate number of scars—none of them with the telltale puckered roundels of bullet wounds, most of them indicative of involvement in knife fights. For some reason he couldn't immediately identify Young Doc found this worrisome, but—lacking time to dwell on it—he tucked it in the back of his mind for later.

 **What concerned Young Doc** more at that moment was that his patient continued shivering yet exhibited no goose bumps... and the fact that even though he had to be in a considerable amount of pain and discomfort, he made no articulate sounds. _Classic hypothermia paired with traumatic aphasia?_ Not good at all—but Young Doc wasn't about to voice that in his patient's hearing.

It was time to examine the ribs. "This is going to hurt. I'm sorry..." The left side of the rib cage seemed unaffected. As Young Doc palpated each rib on the damaged side, he kept his eyes on his patient's face. Kim was making a valiant effort at responding only with grunts and grimaces, but his face reflected anguish and Young Doc wasn't fooled. It wasn't until he felt the surface indentation at the ninth and tenth ribs—the so-called false ribs—that Kim groaned through clenched teeth. By then Young Doc knew all he needed to know... those two ribs were cracked, possibly fractured—any pressure could drive them inwards with lethal consequences. As far as Young Doc could determine, though, the bones were intact, so there was a good chance no internal organs had been pierced by errant splinters. With any luck, peritonitis wouldn't set in and the patient would survive.

"Can you sit up for me? No? Here, I'll help you..." When Young Doc angled around to apply the stethoscope to the patient's back, he encountered the tattoo between his shoulder blades... not a very big one—maybe four by eight inches in size, outlined in black and infilled in muted shades of grey and dark brown. While he was no art expert and couldn't rightly identify the subject, the crisply-executed aboriginal style seemed vaguely familiar. The tattoo itself wasn't new, but the long thin scar bisecting it on the diagonal looked fairly recent and had been made by either a razor or a fine sharp knife. The parallel rows of unevenly spaced tiny scars on either side showed where it had been clumsily stitched together by an inexperienced hand.

By the time Jonesy returned with a cup of reinforced tea, Kim was rewrapped in the quilt with only his right arm exposed. He nodded his thanks. Jonesy hung around as Young Doc waited for the drug to take effect and make sure Kim wasn't going to vomit before helping him lie back down again. Positioned on his left side and bolstered with pillows, he immediately started fading.

"How long was he in the water?"

Jonesy shrugged. "Slim didn't say. But I'll tell you what... that lake's so damned cold you're risking your manhood just by wading in hip-deep..."

Young Doc stood up. "My stomach thinks my throat's been cut. That stew warm yet?"

 _CHAPTER SEVEN—PART TWO_

 **KITCHEN TABLE PHILOSOPHY**

" _ **Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it."**_ _(Don Marquis)_

 **Getting on toward night...** Jonesy filled two bowls with stew and brought them to the kitchen table along with cutlery, napkins and a basket of cold biscuits left over from breakfast. Before joining Young Doc he refilled the kettles on the stove—Slim would be needing hot wash water, too, whenever he came in. They ate quickly and in silence, Young Doc going back for thirds until Jonesy feared he would explode.

"How about some apple pie and cheese?" Jonesy asked (as if he needed to ask about the pie!).

"Sounds good to me... bring it on." After checking his other patient to ensure he was still out of it and the plaster was drying satisfactorily, Young Doc extracted a jug of cognac from his Gladstone bag and carried it to the kitchen table where Jonesy was already seated. Pulling the cork with his teeth, Young Doc topped off both their coffees without asking.

"Now Freddy... you know I don't..." Jonesy started to object.

"Tonight you do... doctor's orders!" Young Doc raised his cup in a salute. _"Confusion to the enemy!"_

"How bad off is that boy?" Jonesy queried after a few minutes, nodding toward the sofa.

"If he lives until morning he won't be going anywhere for a while, either. You'll have to keep him quiet and not let him lift anything heavy for a couple of weeks."

"What do you mean, _keep him_?" Jonesy yelped. "We're not taking him to raise!"

Young Doc shrugged. "What do you suggest? Take him out back and drown him in the rain barrel? And keep your voice down, would you?"

"You do understand that boy's a _halfbreed_ , don't you?" Jonesy demanded.

"And your point is?"

"Just sayin', is all..."

"You know me better than that... or should by now." The tone was reproachful.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note about frontier doctors...**_ _Back in those days, before HMOs and governmental enforcement of equal rights, it was unfortunately true that many frontier physicians could and did refuse to treat indigenous, black or any other persons of color. Newly-emancipated slaves accustomed to receiving medical care_ gratis _from Missy up at the Big House found themselves in a collective pickle where health care providers were concerned. And most Native Americans in any case preferred entrusting health matters to their own medical professionals. Young Doc had a one-door policy—everyone went in and out by the same front door and if they didn't like what was in the waiting room they were welcome to go wait out in the street or consult another doctor.)_

" **Like I said, if he's still alive** in a couple of days he'll probably recover quickly enough... two to three months... "

" _Two to three months?!"_ Jonesy squawked. "I'm about to run out of bedsheets as it is!"

"Bedsheets... oh... for binding, you mean. I'm of a mind to hold off on that for the time being... let's see how well he holds up without it."

"Why?"

"The big brains back East are coming around to suspecting tight binding invites lung fever by restricting breathing," Young Doc said. "I think they may be onto something."

Jonesy was frowning and nodding his head negatively. "Slim might have something to say about this, and Jess is gonna pitch a fit."

Young Doc went on, "Slim's the one brought him home. Must've had a reason..."

"Maybe his people'll come looking for him..."

"Oh... I rather doubt _that_ , Jonesy." Young Doc refilled their cups, this time with a larger proportion of cognac. _"Sláinte!"_

Changing the subject, Young Doc said, "You know, that joker's gotta be the cleanest range rat in the territory... smells just like my wife's fresh-washed unmentionables on the line."

Jonesy wasn't to be deterred. "I just don't like the idea of a halfbreed savage loose in the house when everyone's asleep," he insisted.

"For Pete's sake, Jonesy," Young Doc retorted with impatience. "Show some compassion, how about it?"

Jonesy had the grace to look abashed.

"Furthermore, if he's got any native blood in him, I'll eat my sombrero. He's half something all right... I just haven't figured out what yet."

"How do you know that?"

"It would take too long to explain."

"What is he then? What's he doing here?"

"That's the question, isn't it?"

"Looks harmless enough, I suppose," Jonesy admitted grudgingly.

"So does Jess, when he's asleep. He wears a different face behind a gun."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning it's not always prudent to take anyone at face value until you get to know him."

Jonesy was appalled, hands flailing and the whites of his eyes showing. "Oh Lordy... please don't tell me Slim's brought _another_ gunhawk into this house!"

"Calm down, Jonesy. I'm not saying anything of the sort. Just... keep your eyes and ears open."

"I'm not much liking the sound of that, Freddy... if there's any chance he's dangerous..."

"I think you and yours are safe enough for tonight," Young Doc chuckled, "He won't be feeling like moving around much for a couple of days... and even if he does, he sure as hell isn't gonna be moving fast."

Young Doc hoped he was right about that, adding a wee drop more to their coffees. _"Na zdrowie!"_

"And that's supposed to make me feel safer?" Jonesy grumbled.

Young Doc chose to withhold for the time being another observation he'd made. He'd re-guesstimated his patient's age based on two factors—muscle development and definition too advanced for a teenager, and inflexibility of ribs and intercostal cartilage on the undamaged side, indicating bones that were done growing. As that didn't happen until around age twenty-five, he was pretty sure his patient was already full-grown and as big as he was likely to get. Jonesy was already twitchy enough about having a strange teenager in the house. He'd be even more nervous if he knew their unknown guest was not only an adult but one evidently _not_ unaccustomed to violent encounters.

 **Thirty minutes later...** Young Doc got up to check his patients.

"Shouldn't the chloroform have worn off by now?" Jonesy fretted, worried about Jess' failure to wake up. They were still sitting at the kitchen table, emitting pie, cheese and cognac burps.

"It appears he's sleeping naturally," Young Doc said. "That's somewhat surprising."

"Not to me," Jonesy offered. "He's had a couple of bad nights here lately."

"Nightmares again?" Young Doc inquired.

"Worse than usual." Jonesy looked sleep-deprived as well, lines of fatigue and pain etched in his face. Chronic back pain could be so debilitating in so many ways.

"Still won't talk about 'em, eh?"

"No. He's a stubborn cuss, that one. Won't admit to anything. You could shoot his arm off and he'd claim it was just a graze."

Young Doc felt a philosophic dissertation coming on. _"I have been a stranger in a strange land.._. Exodus 2:22." he intoned. "In his own way, Jess Harper is as much a stranger in a strange land as that other young man."

"How do you mean, Freddy?" Jonesy objected. "Jess isn't a stranger... he's been around five months now. He's from Texas. He's as American as we are."

"Have you ever _been_ to Texas?"

"No."

"Why do you think Jess never talks about his family, where or how they lived?"

"I dunno... his business, I guess." Jonesy was uncomfortable discussing Jess' history, although he'd already passed along in confidence what little he did know—knowledge that had come to him inadvertently—because he trusted in Young Doc's discretion.

"Well, I _have_ been places—including parts of Texas—where poor whites lived little better than animals on cane, rice and cotton plantations. They worked right alongside the slaves but weren't treated as well because slaves were valuable and the indigent whites weren't. I suspect Jess might have come from that kind of family... and if so, and considering what he experienced in the war and the path he followed afterward, then his life's been one long struggle from the day he was born. The difference between that kind of culture and the way we live here is even greater than the difference between us and the way people live in big Eastern cities... with gas lighting and indoor bathrooms with running water, and museums and libraries and universities."

"I'm sure he knows that, Freddy... he's been around. He's a mite short on book learnin' but he's not stupid."

"Of course he isn't... but _seeing_ how other people live and _learning_ to how live that way yourself aren't the same thing."

"Other men lived through the war and came home normal... like Slim. And the Shermans weren't rich folks... they worked the land and worked it hard. Why's Jess any different?"

"The difference is that Slim had a home to come home to... and a family—his momma and Andy and you. And didn't you once tell me it still took him more than a year to readjust to civilian life? Might've taken longer if he hadn't had Andy to look after. He already had a strong grounding in family values and Christian ethics to guide him back. My daddy had great admiration for Slim's father—said he was a man of principle who led by example. As I see it, Slim has followed in his footsteps. Who guided Jess, dya think?"

"No one, I reckon... but..."

"It's gonna take time, Jonesy... maybe more time than y'all are willing to invest in him."

"I just don't understand what he needs that he's not finding here... he's got a home, we look after him, we treat him like family and yet..." Jonesy shook his head mournfully, "it's not enough. We keep hoping he'll settle, the longer he stays here. Every time he gets a burr under his saddle blanket and runs out, seems he comes back in worse shape than before. Hurts Andy's feelings something awful and makes Slim mad as all get out. I'm afraid one day Slim's gonna tell him to stay gone."

"At least he _does_ keep coming back, Jonesy. That shows that in his heart he wants to fit in. It's up here he's having trouble transitioning to a different lifestyle." Young Doc tapped his head.

"You mean he's crazy?"

"Not like the lunatics locked up in asylums... it's more like a part of the soul is broken... or lost. The Jesses of this world don't always understand what they're looking for, they just know they have to keep on looking—scared they'll never find it and scared it'll be taken away from them if they do find it.

There's a movement over in Europe to start up new disciplines in medicine—they're calling them 'psychiatry' and 'psychology'—doctors who study how the brain works and what controls how the mind thinks. They believe that if they can understand that, then they'll know how to help someone like Jess mend the broken parts or find the missing pieces... but until then all anyone can do is just what you and Slim and Andy have _been_ doing... keep on letting Jess know his life has value, that he's needed and appreciated and wanted here."

"I understand what you're saying, Freddy... but the problem seems to be keeping him tied down long enough for that to sink in."

Young Doc gave a faint smile. "Maybe what happened today was fate stepping in do just that. He's not gonna be doing any drifting for a _long_ time."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," Jonesy said sourly.

"Wonder what's keeping Slim?" Young Doc mused, off-topic.

"That boy's horse was lamed up some. He's probably doctorin' it."

Young Doc checked his pocket watch. "I'll give him thirty more minutes. If he isn't in by then I'm going out after him."

 **Jonesy was looking positively glum** as Young Doc refilled both their cups with straight brandy, toasting " _L'chaim!"_ He pulled a sheaf of blank notepaper and a pencil out of his black bag, then licked the end of the pencil and started making a list.

"What's that, Freddy?"

"Instructions for Andy for tomorrow. I'm gonna stay over tonight but I have to run home in the morning and take care of some business. Then I'll come right back as soon as I can come up with reinforcements."

"Oh." Jonesy's eyelids were beginning to droop as Young Doc laid that paper aside and started on a fresh sheet.

"And this next one's for Jess."

"I see." Jonesy's eyes were beginning to glaze over.

Young Doc set that list on top of the first one.

"This one's for the new kid..."

"I told you... we can't keep him here..." Jonesy mumbled.

List number three was added to the stack and Young Doc kept on going.

"And this last one... is for you..." He handed list number four over to Jonesy, who read it and tossed it back.

"I done told you, Freddy... I can't lay up for a week. Who's gonna cook and play nursemaid?"

"Well, it won't be _you_. I'll have you some help here by tomorrow afternoon. Say, does Slim have an extra nightshirt I could borrow? And we'll have to get those two boys suited up for the night..."

Suddenly Jonesy yelped and smacked himself on the forehead. "Laundry! DAMMIT!"

"What about it?"

"Every stick of Slim and Jess' underwear and nightclothes is in the dirty laundry... except..."

"Except?"

Jonesy got up and tottered into the bedroom Jess and Slim shared, returning a few minutes later with a stack of sleeping attire in various shades of pink.

Young Doc gawped. "Holy cow! How did _that_ happen?"

"It's a long story..."

 _(_ _ **Gracie's explanation of the laundry fiasco at La Casa Sherman...**_ _Men's sleepwear fashions were in flux in the mid-1800s... Though originally intended as women's undergarments, the one-piece front-buttoning drop-bottomed flannel 'union suit' had mostly replaced the traditional long nightshirt as sleepwear of choice for most men. These in turn were yielding to a newer fashion—the two-piece longjohns' or 'longhandles'._

 _Longjohns were the off-white of unbleached cotton but the union suit came in one color only—a bright Turkey red which, after repeated washings, eventually faded to an anemic pink no manly man would be caught dead in. By that time the item would usually have reached the end of its intended purpose and would be recycled into kitchen towels or baby diapers, or relegated to the ragbag._

 _Dyes not being color-safe in those days, every housewife knew not to put a brand-new dye-laden union suit in the washboiler with white or light laundry. But Jess didn't know any better when it came his turn to do the laundry. Jonesy—thrifty individual that he was—had squirreled away for emergency use in future the now fuchsia-pink but still perfectly serviceable garments. And a good thing, too... or some individuals would be going to bed buck nekkid that night!)_

 **Young Doctor Wilfred Whatleigh** was big on lists. He always left a written treatment plan with every one of his patients even if the instructions amounted to (1) go to bed and (2) drink lots of water. That way he didn't have to listen to a litany of specious excuses by people who couldn't be bothered to follow directions and then wanted to blame him for the consequences. If a patient couldn't read, he drew diagrams and stick figures. Worked for him, anyway.

Young Doc was adept at compartmentalizing, so while he'd been compiling lists of customized patient care he'd also been putting together in his head additional lists of supplies needed and warm bodies available for pinch-hitting in an emergency situation requiring drastic measures. If, as he suspicioned, Slim was coming down with something worse than a head cold, there was absolutely no way he would be able to handle relay work, run the ranch and care for three other indisposed males all by himself.

Young Doc had been thinking longingly of his oversized bathtub, filled with hot soapy water and infused with scented bath salts by his diminutive wife who would scrub his back and massage his aching arms and shoulders. On the other hand, Pearl would most surely cloud up and rain all over his parade over the state of his clothes and rip him a new one for drinking, of which she did not approve. (Pearl was not your typical subservient helpmeet.) By now Young Doc had surpassed three sheets and was in fact sailing under full rigging, having snorted his way to the bottom of the brandy bottle, but he remained hyperaware of what needed to be done here tonight and tomorrow morning and had already accepted he'd be staying overnight.

Jonesy's head had slowly descended toward the table until achieving contact, at which time his candle was snuffed for the evening. His arms dangled by his knees as he drooled on the oilcloth. Young Doc woke him up long enough to march him to his bedroom, help him change out of his plaster-stiffened union suit and into a nightshirt, and install him in bed. After pulling a quilt over him, Young Doc turned to check on Andy sleeping fitfully in the other bed, the rash having spread to his shoulders, chest and back. It was time to go check on Slim.


	8. Chapter 8

_CHAPTER EIGHT—PART ONE_

 **THE LAST MAN STANDING GOES DOWN**

" _ **The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."**_ _(Douglas Adams)_

 **Much later...** Slim was sitting on a milking stool trying to stitch up a triangular flap of torn flesh on the pony's chest. His throat was sore, his eyes were burning and watering and he was having trouble threading the catgut through the eye of the needle. The animal was either very tired or unusually affectionate as he'd been resting his nose alternately on Slim's head and shoulder, both of which were now silvery with slobber.

Slim had been inhabiting his wet, muddy clothes since midafternoon. After bringing the horses into the barn, he'd unsaddled all three, fed and watered them while Andy tended to the chickens and his zoo inmates. When Andy'd returned to offer help, he'd chased the boy out of the barn and into the house, knowing that if he kept his brother any longer Jonesy would be on the warpath. He returned to rubbing each horse down with burlap sacks because it went against the grain to put up an animal rough. Then he got a small fire going in the forge to warm up some of Jonesy's secret-herbs-and-spices all-purpose veterinary liniment, after which he applied poultices to the pony's knees with rags torn from feed bags.

Meanwhile, rhinoviruses had been romping merrily throughout his sinus cavities, histamine levels were near flood stage and mucus production going into overdrive. He'd been trying to delude himself that it was just damp, horse dander and hay dust—that he wasn't really sick. On top of that, he'd got so hot he'd taken off his shirt and streams of perspiration were pouring off him. He was starting to feel slightly nauseous.

 **The rain had stopped** by the time Young Doc sauntered out to the barn to drag out Slim—by force if necessary. Cross-tied in the breezeway was the homeliest pony Young Doc had ever clapped eyes on. The medico took in his friend's pale face and shaking hands. "Aw shit," he mournfully intoned, jamming his hands in his pockets. He had one more list to make up.

"Slim... you need to come in now while you can still walk."

"Gotta get this done first," Slim said flatly. "Soon's I put him up, I'll be in."

Young Doc reached down and gently tugged the needle and catgut from Slim's hands. "I'll do it... you go sit on that footlocker. We need to talk anyway."

"Can't it wait 'til morning?" Slim croaked, already starting to lose his voice.

" 'Fraid not, no..." First Young Doc gave his prognoses vis-à-vis Jess and Kim. Then he explained the severity of Jonesy's condition. Finally he dropped the measles bomb.

"You're not serious?" Slim was incredulous.

"Serious as a heart attack, me boy."

Slim put his head in his hands. "Just shoot me. Shoot me now."

"Maybe later. We're not done here tonight and I need your help while you're still of any use."

After leading the pony into the nearest empty stall, Young Doc's eye caught the one saddle on the rack that had to be the stranger's—with saddlebags, bedroll and warbag slung over it. "This the new kid's gear?" he called out. Slim confirmed that it was. "I'll take it in, then."

On the porch, Young Doc directed, "Get your clothes off. I'll bring out some hot water and soap and towels." Between the two of them they managed to sluice off the worst of the slime.

If Slim noticed the color of the longhandles Doc handed him, he was too sick to care. In any event there was nothing else to wear. Young Doc made him sit by the fireplace, wrapped in a quilt with his feet in a basin of hot water and Epsom salts. He fixed a hot toddy with honey, peppermint oil and brandy (from the reserve bottle in his black bag) and made Slim drink it.

"One more thing to do and then you can go to bed..."

 **And this is where** Slim Sherman's strength of character really shone, because he could be depended on to see any emergency through to resolution, no matter the cost to himself. As ill as he was and worsening by the minute, he drew on his last reserves of energy to assist Young Doc in wrangling Jess into a pair of longjohns with one leg scissored off the bottoms to accommodate the cast, then trundling his fallen comrade from the parlor to the darkened bedroom. Fortunately, Jess wasn't alert enough to be aware of the color of his nightgear either.

Presenting a chamberpot, Young Doc acquainted Jess with the unsavory reality of no access in the near future to the little house out back. He would in fact be spending the next three days flat on his back because that was the minimum length of time required for the plaster cast to cure. Needless to say, _that_ didn't go over too well. They made him as comfortable as they could, propped with pillows. Young Doc made him down a cup of honeyed, laudanum-laced tea before leaving him muttering with helpless fury.

Slim's head was swimming and he didn't have to be told a second time when Young Doc ordered him to bed. Remembering he had another patient needing to be attired, Young Doc repaired to the parlor and closed the bedroom door behind him.

Young Doc had to wake Kim—groggy but able to stand—to get him suited up. There were only two items of pink nightwear left... both obviously Slim's as they were far too large for anyone else. Young Doc chose the nightshirt for himself and the union suit for his charge, on the grounds that it was warmer. It took some doing to get his patient into the garment—his arms and legs weren't cooperating all that well. In the process the doctor was pleased to find that normal body temperature had been restored.

Under the direct light of the overhead oil lamp the young man's skin tone was no longer ashy but had taken on more of that golden glow unique among the peoples of Polynesia—distinctively different from the coppery sheen overlaying the swarthiness of the Native American. And another kernel of disquiet took up residence in Young Doc's mind as he guided his patient toward the fainting couch where he wanted him to sleep with his head and chest elevated, at least for the first few days.

Young Doc was dog-tired and knew he had to get some rest, but he also knew that although his body was ready to comply he was too keyed up to fall off right away. It had been a busy, frustrating day.

 _CHAPTER EIGHT—PART TWO_

 **LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS**

" _ **Jumping to conclusions is like playing with damp gunpowder... both are likely to go off in the wrong directions.**_ _" (Author Unknown)_

 **Once he was sure** the youngster had gone back to sleep, Young Doc addressed the issue of what was bothering him about the newcomer. What was wrong with this picture?

Other than his own children or his crèche-brother Lindsay McNutt, Young Doc had rarely encountered Eurasians in America outside of a Chinatown enclave in any of the major eastern or western seaports, but he suspected he might have one on his hands now. Right about the time he'd encountered that tattoo his subconscious had taken a troublesome turn and he couldn't shake off his uneasiness. He didn't want to be an agent of alarm, but neither did he want to be responsible for any relaxation of vigilance, which was why he'd soft-soaped his replies to Jonesy.

When word got around that Slim Sherman was openly harboring a notorious gunfighter at his ranch, his friends and neighbors were aghast. Many citizens were outraged and no few complaints lodged with the sheriff. There was even talk of resurrecting the vigilance committee, organized almost two years ago by a previous sheriff, that had rid Laramie of the very worst of its scofflaws... at least for a short while. Even though most folks had come to understand that Jess Harper wasn't part of the remaining criminal element and even though there were no warrants outstanding on him, he was still given a wide berth on the streets by those who hadn't yet got to know him personally.

Young Doc knew Jess well enough by now to count him as trustworthy, but didn't understand—any more than Slim or Jonesy did—why Jess couldn't, or wouldn't, put greater effort into erasing his reputation as a man to be feared. An early consensus of opinion (still held by some who for whatever their reasons just didn't cotton to the man) was that Jess hadn't been upfront with Slim about that bad rep... that had Slim known beforehand he would never have hired him... that Slim was still being conned by a consummate snakecharmer, and no good would come of it.

Because Young Doc held Slim Sherman in such high regard—believing him to be an individual of integrity, loyalty, common sense and good judgment—he _wanted_ to believe Slim knew what he was doing and had a purpose in bringing this new stray into his home. Yet, Young Doc's misgivings tweaked at him until he convinced himself that the safety of his family and friends surmounted all other considerations. He was in a tight spot here, hemmed in by his Hippocratic oath to _'do no harm'_ on one front and on the other philosopher Jeremy Bentham's dictum _'It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.'**_

"Better a little caution than a great regret*," he muttered to himself, preparing a morphine hypo and sending aloft an unspoken apology. _Lord, forgive me for what I'm about to do and make sure I've got the dosage right._ His intention was not to kill this patient, of course, but render him incapable of perpetrating any mischief while the rest of the household slept. Kim didn't stir when Young Doc popped him in the haunch.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _*Although this saying is attributed to George Samuel Clason's_ The Gold Lender of Babylon _published c1926, Young Doc first heard it while on a train trip to Denver from a seatmate who claimed it was an ancient Mesopotamian proverb. **And let us not forget that pointy-eared sage who some four centuries hence would famously utter practically the same maxim: 'logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one'.)_

 **When Young Doc had come in** from the barn earlier, he'd dropped the saddlebags and gear on the floor just inside the door. Reassured that his patient was continuing to breathe and still had a pulse (if thready), he now toted these to the kitchen table around the corner and out of sight. Rifling through the contents, which mostly consisted of the usual trail kit, he discovered two lethal-looking knives in sheaths. He extracted the larger one to examine it... an inelegant though perfectly balanced weapon with brass ferrules and guard and Oriental ideograms carved into the hilt above a tapered eight inch blade... a hunting knife for two-legged prey. The second was a double-edged throwing knife also of Asian manufacture. A third knife had been attached to the saddle in an odd-shaped sheath—this proved to be a common, unembellished cane cutter. All three were honed to a razor's edge. As gratified as Young Doc was to have his suspicions confirmed, these discoveries only added to his store of questions... and the lack of a pistol or gunbelt only fueled his earlier fears.

The first of two carefully wrapped waterproofed parcels contained cannabis, rolling papers and matches. The second one held two seal chops individually wrapped in squares of padded silk, a tin of seal paste and a small velvet drawstring pouch containing a heavy gold band on a fine gold chain. The outside of the band was worn to a satin finish with many years of use, with the inscription 'Ysabel 3 December 1860' on the inside. Further investigation produced a considerable wad of cash rolled up in a sock... far too much money for a young itinerant to have obtained through any legitimate means.

Although Young Doc failed to find what he was looking for—some form of written identification in English—the chops were just as good. The smaller of the two was carved of ivory with a fairly simple round design—probably a personal name seal. The larger, more intricate one had been fashioned from jade with a more complex squared seal, and its knob was a three-dimensional replica of the tattoo—which was now identifiable as a dragon. Next, Young Doc fetched a piece of stationery from Slim's desk. He applied each of the chops to the paste and pressed them onto the paper, then very carefully wiped them clean and rolled them back into their shrouds.

Young Doc took great care in replacing the items in the saddlebags exactly as he'd found them, except the knives, which he hid behind a row of books in the triangular corner cupboard that housed part of the Sherman library. When the seal imprints were dry, he folded up the paper and put it in his doctor's kit. Finally, looking around and deciding there was nothing more to do until morning, Young Doc gathered all the remaining unused quilts and blankets he could find and made himself a pallet on the floor in front of the fireplace, the sofa having proved two feet too short.

 **Relatively well-traveled** for a non-seafarer, the thirty-year-old doctor had been introduced to body modification in Edinburgh, where he'd rubbed elbows with students from all over the globe. Sometimes piercings and tattoos were just personal adornment—such as women piercing their ears—and sometimes they represented something more sinister.

Working in San Francisco and Honolulu where Asians and Eurasians abounded, Young Doc had treated scores of victims of gang warfare involving Chinese triads and Japanese yakuza. While many of these gangs were strictly ethnocentric, many more were composed of Eurasians so homogenized they attracted no undue attention on the streets there. Most of them were from poor, unskilled families or bastards who, with no futures in either parent's society, turned to a life of crime—no different from the American West's many other versions of unwanted mixed breeds. Many of the young men Young Doc had dealt with were just as innocuous-looking as his newest patient—which of course made them all the more deadly.

Elements all gangs had in common were affinities for tattoos denoting clan affiliations and rings representing their associations. Gang tattoos almost always tended toward predatory creatures such as the one his patient wore—snakes, wolves, lions, tigers, bears. Dragons and other mythical beasts were favorites. Another triad/yakuza signature was a preference for working close in, silently, with knives rather than from a distance with firearms... and his patient had all those knife scars.

An unnerving possibility thrust itself into Young Doc's mind, which could explain the presence of a Eurasian gangster in this out-of-the-way locale, making his blood run cold and sending a ripple of apprehension down his spine...

 **Young Doc's father-in-law** , Wing Chen Li (known locally as Lee Wing), had more mortal enemies than Carter had little liver pills. Outwardly a successful businessmen and respected citizen of Laramie, Wing was known to a select few (and suspected by many others) as a crime lord in mufti... a deadly spider whose web of operations extended far beyond national boundaries, almost certainly involving Chinese secret societies. To Young Doc's knowledge, none of Wing's associates or underlings had ever been summoned to Laramie, as his location had been carefully chosen to maintain anonymity and safety. He conducted his long-distance business interests, both legitimate and illegitimate, through intermediaries—including his _compradore_ Lindsay McNutt. In addition to affording the tidiest of whities to the citizens of the frontier township through his official front, the 'Celestial Laundry', Wing conducted a lucrative trade in illicit goods and nefarious services which the sheriff tended to overlook as long as it remained discreet.

Young Doc was aware, though not having ever been directly so informed, that Wing from time to time arranged for the permanent disposal of inconvenient or undesirable persons. It was not outside the realm of possibility that he'd imported an outside resource to deal with a local problem, although Young Doc couldn't, offhand, think of anyone who'd crossed Wing lately. Another equally repugnant idea was that a rival crime lord could have sent someone here to dispatch Wing.

Young Doc decided, for the time being, to keep private his speculations as to criminal intent—at least until he had an opportunity to discuss the matter with his father-in-law. The tattoo might mean something... or it might mean nothing at all beside artistic expression. And all those knife scars _could_ have been acquired in some way other than hand-to-hand combat. In the meantime, it might prove fruitful to wait and see what the young man chose to reveal about himself on his own—if he lived. After all, as Young Doc had once been informed by Wing, the most successful assassin was the one who appeared least likely to be one. Unlike American gunfighters, an assassin's stock in trade was secrecy and keeping a low or—even better—invisible profile.

In the planes of his patient's face Young Doc had detected no evidence of the Native American heritage assumed by Slim and Jonesy—but the Asian influence was there if you knew what to look for. From the unlikely combination of all he'd noted so far, Young Doc deduced that his patient's origins were a multiplicity of European, Asian and Pacific Islander. And the most likely place for such a mélange of ethnicities within a single individual were the Sandwich Islands (which we now know as Hawai'i)—crossroads of transoceanic trade between America and the Far East.

But what would have brought a _hapahaole_ this far inland? This was Young Doc's last thought as he drifted off.

s


	9. Chapter 9

_CHAPTER NINE—PART ONE_

 **SHIPS IN THE NIGHT**

 _ **There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.**_ _(E.B. White)_

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note about opiates...**_ _As the mechanics of sleep weren't studied until the late 1920s, scientists of Doctor Whatleigh's era weren't aware of opiates' contribution to sleep deprivation. They figured that if a patient was sedated into unconsciousness, that was as good as natural sleep. Wrong! Morphia alleviated pain so that a patient could relax into a sleep-like state, but prevented the recipient from reaching the delta-wave—or deep-sleep—stage necessary for completion of the circadian rest cycle. Moreover, it didn't produce consistent results. In fact, many patients reported an extraordinary clarity of hearing and thought when relieved of the preoccupation of pain. And they didn't always remain unconscious quite as long as the provider had calculated.)_

 **Sunday, October 2 (zero-dark-thirty)...** Kim awakened disoriented and gasping for breath, heart racing. The room was stuffy, lit only by the dying embers in the fireplace. In addition to the torment of his ribs, every muscle he owned was stiff and shrieking in protest. He debated whether the need to urinate outweighed the torture of trying to sit up. Unfortunately, it did. Slowly he pushed himself to an upright position and looked around in vain for a slop jar. None to be seen. What he did see was a massive quilt-covered lump on the floor just a few feet away, approximately the size of a small buffalo. Whatever it was, he had no wish to disturb it, but the need was growing rather urgent.

Struggling to his feet, Kim leaned against the wall for support as he made his way to the door, which creaked as he eased it open. The ridiculously oversized union suit was an impediment to progress... he kept having to push up the sleeves and hitch up legs that dragged on the floor. Stepping out onto the cold porch boards in his bare feet and clinging to the door frame with one hand, he experienced a mild wave of vertigo in the rush of chilly if welcome pre-dawn air. He waited for it to subside before attempting two more steps toward the barely visible railing, which was when his big toe connected with an empty milk pail and sent it clattering off the porch.

"Going somewhere?"

Kim jerked at the gruff voice coming from behind and the sudden sharp movement sent a stab through his chest, almost costing him his balance. A supersized individual materialized beside him and a ham-like hand took him by the upper arm. "Steady there! Easy! Easy!"

Before registering that this was the doctor, Kim automatically tried to jerk away—sending another lightning bolt through his torso and causing him to hiss like a cobra. Even in the darkness the man must have registered the alarm on his face.

"Sorry... sorry... didn't mean to hurt you. Afraid you'd fall. What're you doing out here, anyway?... Oh... gotcha... well, now that I'm here..." The big man pointed to the far end of the porch, at six foot six towering above his five foot six companion. "Let's go over there... be careful."

 **Young Doc had been lying awake** on his pallet, anticipating the advent of a monumental hangover and poring over yet another dilemma—he'd come prepared to deal with only one patient, after all. There wasn't much chance of anyone just happening by and the stage wouldn't be along anytime soon either. There was only one run on Sundays and it wasn't until afternoon—so he'd have to get back to town himself, leaving his sick and injured friends not only without a caregiver but unprotected from this unknown entity.

On the other hand, a contracted assassin likely didn't present a danger to anyone other than his designated target. And with a young man as badly disabled as Young Doc knew for a fact this one was, there was no way he could saddle a horse and ride it twelve miles into town, much less get past Wing's bodyguards. The doctor had been sending another silent appeal for direction skyward to his higher power when Kim had literally kicked the bucket outside.

Now, hiking up his nightshirt in the dark to take a leak over a porch railing alongside a possible future murder suspect, Young Doc ruefully contemplated how his own choices had led him to this place in time... carrying the responsibility for keeping afloat this house of misery.

They concluded their business and turned toward the door, Kim inching his way along the railing for support with one hand and holding up the union suit with the other. It would take only three steps away from the railing to reach the door itself but Young Doc grasped Kim by the upper arm, seeing his unsteadiness. Inside the door, he attempted to steer Kim toward the couch.

Kim balked, shaking his head. Young Doc led him to the kitchen instead.

"Too close to daybreak to try to go back to sleep anyway. You wanna sit up and keep me company?" His charge nodded affirmatively.

At the kitchen table, Kim settled gingerly into a chair facing the work area, propping his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his knuckles, watching the big man move about the confined space with an economical grace—lighting the overhead oil lamp, feeding kindling into the cookstove, using twists of newspaper to get the fire going, prepping the blue enameled coffee pot and setting it on a back eye. In one corner a four-legged frame supported a thirty-gallon cistern with a spigot near the bottom. Young Doc removed the lid and peered inside. Seeing it was near empty, he picked up a wooden bucket and attempted to wrench open the nearest kitchen door to get to the well pump. It was swelled shut. Forgetting there was a second door to the side yard, Young Doc swore and stomped off to get his boots. It took four trips the long way around through the parlor to refill the barrel, after which he put three large pots of water on the stove to warm up. He located the sack of coffee beans and the grinder, then loaded the pot. All this without saying another word to Kim or even looking in his direction... as if he weren't even there.

 **Kim had been blessed** (or cursed, he sometimes felt) with an exquisite ability to read the invisible meanings between the lines. He could interpret body language as easily as the spoken word. Nuance and inflection often conveyed more meaning to him than the verbiage flowing in his direction, almost as if he were able to peer directly into someone's head and decipher the thoughts swirling about in there. Sometimes this ability was helpful in forming an appropriate response. At other times it was simply irritating... like a headache interfering with his own thought processes.

When he was very much younger it had caused him a great deal of trouble: he'd tended to bypass the spoken word and respond—often inappropriately—to data as he perceived it to be meant, rather than what the speaker was actually saying. It had taken training—a lot of training—to learn patience and self-restraint, to internalize his reactions and shield them from public scrutiny, to assemble seemingly disparate bits and chunks of information into an aggregate, fairly accurate image. It was so much easier to navigate the turbulent currents of human emotion once you had a complete picture.

While Kim knew the pitfalls of making generalizations about other folks' cultures, he was as fallible as everyone else. Some of the unfavorable observations he'd made about Americans of European extraction were: that they were insatiably curious, lacking in patience and short on self-restraint; not particularly adept at hiding emotions; quick to judge and even quicker to react. And they abhorred conversational vacuums. He'd found that if he put on his inscrutable face and sat quietly long enough, the other person—the American—would start talking just because he couldn't help himself. However, this tactic didn't work at all with the natives, who could be impassive as stones when they chose.

So Kim just sat there, unmoving and unspeaking (which he wasn't sure he could do even if he tried), waiting for the doctor to yield first—in the meantime trying to figure out what had changed the man's attitude toward him from the night before, when he'd seemed more empathetic. Not that Kim hadn't ever been treated with a show of contempt over the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes... but he'd somehow got the impression that this man was more broadminded than most. He tried not to let it get him down by reminding himself that if you always expected the worst from people you'd rarely be disappointed.

Young Doc wasn't a very good actor. It didn't take much intuition on Kim's part to sense that he had something on his mind... and that whatever was bothering him had to do with Kim himself. And Kim genuinely had no idea what that might be.

 **For his part,** Young Doc was perturbed that the morphine load hadn't lasted nearly as long as he'd expected. Also, he was reconsidering his suppositions and premonitions and beginning to feel slightly foolish. Perhaps he was overreacting and creating a mountain out of a molehill. The young man with his broomstraw hair sticking out all over and falling in his eyes looked for all the world like a small, bewildered shaggy dog dumped off in a strange neighborhood. Perhaps a little get-acquainted conversation over coffee was in order after all... even if it were all one-way.

As the pot started to boil, Young Doc lit a candle and disappeared through a short narrow door next to the upright piano in the corner. (What sort of household kept a piano in the kitchen, Kim wondered?) Evidently this was the door to the root cellar, as Young Doc emerged a few minutes later carrying a pail of yesterday's milk covered with a flyscreen. The man was so familiar with this kitchen that Kim was wondering if he lived here as well.

Young Doc skimmed cream off the top of the milk into a pitcher and brought it to the table along with two cups and a bowl of brown sugar chunks. Only after filling the cups did it occur to him that his patient might rather have tea than coffee and he asked.

Kim signed as best he could that coffee was fine. Finally the doctor sat down opposite him and their eyes met—Young Doc wondering if the kid knew how to read and write and Kim wondering how long it would take before the man thought to ask him.

The answer to that was: not long. Kim considered pretending to be illiterate and decided that would be more trouble than it was worth. When he nodded affirmatively, the doctor said "Splendid!" and lumbered over to the desk to round up a pencil and a sheet of foolscap he recalled seeing there.

 _CHAPTER NINE—PART TWO_

 **IN THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT**

" _ **We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight,**_

 _ **somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."**_ _(Fydor Dostoevsky)_

 **Slightly later...** The doctor's first questions weren't what Kim was anticipating... "Could you speak _before_ the accident? Were you knocked unconscious?"

Kim nodded _yes_.

"How are you feeling now?"

Kim thought about that, carefully printed _'TERRIFIC'_ and slid the sheet across the table. Young Doc read it, raised an eyebrow, slid it back. The sarcasm was unexpected and unwarranted. Disapproval must have shown on his face because Kim quickly wrote something else...

 _SORRY. MEANT TERRIBLE. HURT ALL OVER._

The abrupt about-face into humor was also a surprise. Young Doc looked up just in time to catch a faint grin... there and gone in a flash. He pointed to his own head. "How are you feeling up here?"

 _HEADACHE._

"What I meant was... ah... what's your state of mind?"

 _SCARED._

Young Doc endeavored to keep his tone light and encouraging. "Don't worry... you'll probably get your voice back in a day or two... when the headache goes away. And there's nothing to be scared about... you're safe here and in good care."

 _HOW SOON CAN LEAVE?"_

Young Doc fixed him with a serious eye, speaking softly but firmly. "There's no 'soon' in this equation, son. You have two fractured ribs... it'll be at least eight weeks before you can even _think_ about getting on a horse, maybe as long as twelve. Any sooner than that, you might as well put a gun to your head and be done with it. And you're not out of the woods by a long shot. You might have other internal damage that hasn't shown up yet. Am I making myself clear enough?"

Kim sighed, scribbling _CAN'T STAY HERE._

Young Doc didn't see the point in embarking on a debate on that score and chose a different line of inquiry. The piece of paper went back and forth across the table, Young Doc careful to ask simple questions of a generic sort and Kim just as carefully keeping his answers to a bare minimum. In this halting manner they established his name (Sky Lizard... true enough, in a way), his tribe (Métis Makah... a blatant lie, no such tribe existed), where he was from (Washington Territory... not an untruth, he _had_ been there), and his destination (Laramie... true, though not his end destination as he didn't have one yet).

 _MY HORSE?_

"Don't worry about him, either. He was in good shape when we left him in the barn last night. Slim doctored his knees and I sewed up his chest. He'll be ready to travel long before you will."

 _THANK YOU._

 **Kim still hadn't gotten a fix** on precisely what sort of information the doctor was looking for when they heard a bedroom door open. Andy shuffled out in nightshirt, robe and slippers, knuckling the sleep from his eyes with one hand and scratching at his chest with the other. His face looked like northern aspect of a southbound baboon.

"I smell coffee. Is there any left?"

"Slim lets you drink coffee?" Young Doc questioned. "And don't scratch!"

"Yeah. Sure. All the time. And I can't help it. It itches," Andy whined, stretching to reach a clean cup from the top rack above the stove.

"You're supposed to stay in bed."

"Not sleepy. Want coffee." Grouchy didn't begin to describe it.

"Stimulants aren't good for children... but okay... make it half milk though..."

"I'm _not_ a child! Oh... Jonesy needs you... he can't get out of bed." Grouchy _and_ defensive. So far he hadn't acknowledged Kim's presence, either.

" _What?_ Why didn't you say so?" Young Doc jumped up, sloshing coffee on the oilcloth and hurrying to the bedroom Andy'd just exited—the one closer to the front door.

"I just did..." Andy retorted to his retreating back, filling his cup and ambling toward the chair to Kim's right. The other bedroom door opened. Slim lumbered out in his longjohns, a barefoot zombie picking gummy boogers out of the corners of his eyes. His sweat-damp hair was greased to his head. He looked like something a dog had buried last week and just now remembered to dig up—not an appealing sight. He glared first at his brother. "Ou dode drik covvee! Pud id dowd!"

"Need it! Want it!" Andy snarled, clutching his cup with defiance, backing away.

Slim was reaching for it, growling "Gibbee dad!" when he noticed Kim. "Ou stih alibe, uh?"

A yowl from the first bedroom split the air. Young Doc emerged from the bedroom and went to his black bag on the parlor table, extracting the hypodermic syringe and a little brown bottle.

"Wud wrog wid Jodesy?" Slim demanded, alarmed.

"He ain't dyin', is he?" Andy piped up in anxiety, very close to his surrogate uncle and perpetually worried that he would die any minute. To a boy of thirteen, sixty was unfathomably ancient.

"Iddet, nod aidt!" Slim spat.

The boy rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. "I know, I know... 'isn't', not 'ain't'!"

"Muscle spasms... they're like cramps only worse," Young Doc explained. "I'm going to give him a shot in the back muscles so they'll stop, but he has to stay in bed for a while or he won't get better." He popped back into the bedroom.

Slim gave up trying to separate his sibling from his coffee and sat down heavily in Young Doc's recently vacated chair. Seeing an opportunity to placate his brother, Andy crept out of his refuge and set the cup in his hand on the table in front of Slim, then got himself another one.

"Taks, Addy..."

 _Slim was REALLY sick!_ The boy appropriated the chair next to Kim, attempting to sort out this new calamity—plus how yesterday's rescue came to be sitting at their kitchen table clad in Slim's old faded-to-pink union suit which was _waaaaay_ too big for him. And now that he noticed, he realized that both the doctor and Slim were splendiferously pink as well. To Andy's knowledge nothing had been salvaged from the laundry disaster—Jonesy must've hidden these items somewhere. A snicker escaped and Slim turned red-rimmed eyes his way. "Wudder ou lavving ad, ou lidda shid...?"

 **Kim heard the sound** of hoofbeats approaching the house seconds before the other two noticed. Boots pounded the porch followed by a fist pounding on the door and a woman's angry voice. "Freddy, you pissant... I know you're in there. Open up!"

 _Oh-oh... Missus Doctor's on the warpath_ , Kim thought. From where he sat he couldn't see around the corner but he could hear every righteously ticked off syllable.

Young Doc came tearing out of the bedroom to answer the door.

"Sally... what are you doing here? Not that I'm not glad to see you... but..."

"You couldn't have sent word you'd be gone all night?!"

"If you'd just listen..."

"You inconsiderate bastard... you stink like a distillery!"

"Extenuating circumstances, I can assure you..."

"And here you are on a Sunday morning lounging around..."

"It couldn't be helped..."

"... in your... goodgawdamighty! What in tarnation are you wearing, anyway? If that thing were any shorter..." (Considering Young Doc's greater girth and elevation, Slim's nightshirt was closely form-fitting and rode up _way_ past his knees.)

"Sally!" Young Doc roared, exasperated. "Will you just SHUT UP and LISTEN?! I have a situation here and I need your help."

"Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?!"

"Because I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Want some coffee? Just made it fresh."

"Does a bear crap in the woods?"

 **Trailed by the doctor,** the owner of the sultry deep-timbred voice hove into Kim's line of sight—an imposingly statuesque woman improbably clad in farmer's bib overalls over men's brogans, a blue chambray workshirt unbuttoned to somewhere below the edge of the bib (where a corset cover should have been visible had there been one... or a corset), and a denim jacket the buttons of which would never, ever meet their respective buttonholes in this lifetime. Brunette curls escaping from a single untidy plait and wide eyes the color of melted chocolate marked her as being a very close relative of Doctor Whatleigh's, if not his twin. Evidently not Missus Doc, then. Awe-inspiring would be an understatement. Kim was entranced.

This oversized female pulled up short as she took in the array of pink garments. "What's this? You had a sweet sixteen slumber party and didn't invite _me?_ " She shrugged out of the jacket and flung it over the back of the nearest chair.

 **Suddenly remembering his manners,** Kim stood up too quickly. Lightheadedness caused him to trip on the overlong legs of his borrowed union suit. Stumbling forward, he plunged his face directly into the woman's substantial cleavage with his nose hung up on the bib of the overalls. His arms automatically flew around her waist to keep himself from falling and her arms automatically flew up and around him in an unintended embrace. In other circumstances, this would have been a pleasurable experience—she smelled nicely of lavender and horse and her very impressive bosom was right up there where nature intended—except he couldn't breathe and his ribs were on fire.

Sally thrust Kim back upright but didn't let go, giving him an amused appraisal. "Well, aren't you just the cutest thing!" She looked at Slim, whose mouth was hanging open. "Is he up for adoption?" To Kim she said, "I'm Sally. Who're you?"

"He don't talk, Miss Sally, he's a dummy," Andy interjected helpfully. "Uh... good morning."

"Good morning to you, too, Andrew. And 'dummy' is not a nice word—the correct term would be 'mute'."

Andy gave an eye roll. Did every grownup he knew feel it incumbent to correct his grammar and vocabulary choices?

Behind her, Young Doc was looking exasperated. "Sally... put that man down. You don't know where he's been." Kim fell back into and almost off his chair when she turned him loose—she had a powerful grip with a crushing strength that made his eyes water. His already injured right arm was numb. There'd be _more_ bruises...

"Don't be such a killjoy, brother dear... it's not every day a young man throws himself on me."

Young Doc gave Kim an indecipherable look. "Allow me to introduce my sister, Sally Lowenstein."

Evidently as familiar with the premises as the doctor, the sister fetched another cup from the shelf and poured her own coffee. Was everyone around here accustomed to making himself or herself at home in other people's kitchens, Kim wondered, instead of waiting to be waited on?

Sally plonked her cup down and then herself in the chair to Kim's left, leaving the doctor nowhere to sit. Adding cream and sugar to her coffee, she addressed Slim. "Your circus appears to be short a few clowns, Matthew. Where's Jonesy? Is it true Jess got run over by the stagecoach? You look like sh... hell, I mean."

"Tags a lod!"

"Don't mention it! What's wrong with him, Freddy?"

"Might be the influenza... too early to tell," Young Doc cut in. "Don't get too close... he might have bugs."

"I got the measles, Miss Sally," Andy proclaimed almost proudly.

"Sorry to hear that."

"Jonesy's back went out on him," Young Doc went on. "Poor soul's got muscle spasms so bad he can't move. Harper's got a fractured right leg and possibly a mild concussion."

"All this happened yesterday?"

"Yep... it's been crazy... that's why I didn't come home last night." Young Doc then launched into a brief recap of the previous day.

 **Still petrified with embarrassment** and not at all confident that his still-trembling legs would support him if he simply got up and walked away, Kim was desperately trying to invoke a cloak of invisibility. Even though no further mention of the awkward—to say the least—encounter had been forthcoming, he couldn't bring himself to look anyone in the face just yet. He gripped his cup with both hands to hide the tremors, his hair winging forward to shield his face as he stared resolutely down into the dregs. His head and ribs throbbed worse than ever and he was starting to feel shaky and hollow. How was it possible to be both hungry and nauseous at the same time? He jumped when two warm fingers brushed a hank of hair away from his eyes.

"And what about this little fella?"

"He managed to get himself two fractured ribs yesterday," Young Doc said.

"Aw... poor kid! What's your friend's name, Andy?"

"He ain't... I mean, he isn't... um... I don't know," Andy admitted.

"Say's his name's 'Sky Lizard'," Young Doc informed them. "Well, wrote it down, anyway."

With the fingers still touching his cheek, Kim risked a sideways look. And in that instant when amber eyes met chocolate ones, the earth tilted on its axis... although as yet neither were aware of it.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's observation...**_ _I 'spose it's possible, though it ain't likely, that some enchanted morning you may see a stranger across a crowded kitchen table and your common sense flies right out the window. Rodgers and Hammerstein phrased this here phenomenon much more prettily though they didn't 'splain it. 'Cause... who can?)_


	10. Chapter 10

_CHAPTER TEN—PART ONE_

 **BARBERING AT THE BREAK OF DAY**

" _ **Beware the woman who starts stroking your hair... she may be after your scalp."**_ _(Unattributed)_

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary re the doctor's sister...**_ _Salviah Louise Whatleigh Lowenstein's marital status was a polite fiction maintained by the family to protect her—and their—reputation as well as that of her young son Jacob. Her baby's daddy was the late Yaakov 'Jake' Lowenstein, the brawny village blacksmith to whom Sally had been engaged. They'd planned to marry as soon as he returned from the war, which he didn't. Yaakov expired after a particularly virulent bout of dysentery and was subsequently interred under a spreading chestnut tree somewhere in Virginia._

 _But let's back up a little... At the age of two, Sally was rendered motherless by the advent of her younger brother Wilfred, whereupon their fearsome widowed Aunt Emmaline moved in to take charge of the household along with her cook/housekeeper, Peach McNutt. The now late Missus Whatleigh had long since given up trying to corral her willful, headstrong, disobedient little girl and had given over her care to a succession of hired nurses, nannies and governesses. Naughty Sally went through them like green apples through a cow. With a new baby of her own and now her brother's infant, Emmaline was ill-equipped to deal with an obstreperous niece... but she soldiered on. That is to say, she dumped Sally's care on Peach, who also had a new son._

 _In 1843 the family pulled up stakes and headed for Oregon. Not a day went by that Emmaline didn't think about throwing the five-year-old brat under the wheels of their Conestoga._

 _Sally attended public schools in Oregon and California before being packed off, kicking and screaming, to the all-girls Ursuline Academy in New Orleans. Although her academic standing was sterling, her behavior was not. Failing to make a proper young lady of Sally Whatleigh after four long miserable years, the nuns were thrilled to forward the wayward eighteen-year-old to Salem College, where she'd been accepted solely on the basis of her academic achievements and a highly-embroidered recommendation from her alumni aunt._

 _Upon graduation, Sally rejoined her family now situated in Laramie, Wyoming, where she taught school for three years and found herself being courted by Yaakov Lowenstein, a kind and courtly gentleman ten years her senior, son of a local blacksmith and livery keeper and himself a blacksmith/farrier. They fell in love and became engaged. Jake's sideline was ornamental metalworking. When Sally displayed an interest in learning the craft and a talent for design, he happily started teaching her._

 _The elder Lowensteins—having despaired of ever engineering a suitable match for their only child from within their own faith—were overjoyed when his intended agreed to convert. They asked only that the nuptials be delayed until Sally had received adequate instruction, which Sarah Lowenstein undertook. The official rites of conversion and the wedding itself would have to take place in Cheyenne as there was no synagogue in Laramie._

 _But it was 1863 and Russian-born Jake heeded, somewhat tardily, his adopted country's call to arms—leaving behind a slightly_ enceinte _fiancée. Which pretty much brings us up to speed on Sally.)_

 **Daybreak...** Sally snatched back her fingers as hastily as if she'd accidently touched a hot eye on the stove. Then she spoke, all traces of facetiousness gone. "I can see you've got your hands full here, Freddy, but... really... you're needed back in town. Actually, measles are what I've come about... it's an epidemic for sure. After you left yesterday the clinic started filling up with hysterical mommas. Pearl and I had to help Emmaline... not to worry... we sent all our kids over to the Wings."

Young Doc swore. "I can't leave these folks unattended..."

"No problem," Sally said. "I can stay the rest of the day until you round up some minders. If need be, I'll stay the night."

"I don't know if that's... that is... somebody'll have to..." Young Doc looked doubtful.

Slim was shaking his head, croaking, "Jezz ad Jodesy ardet godda ledda womed hep em wid... uh..."

Sally knitted her eyebrows. "Translation?"

"Jess and Jonesy aren't going to let a _woman_ help with personal needs," Young Doc finished for him.

"Oh for heaven's sake!" Sally exclaimed. "When you've seen one, you've seen 'em all! We all have to make sacrifices... they'll just have to get over it. Besides, I doubt Jess Harper even thinks of me as a woman!"

"What about the livery stable... and the forge?" Young Doc queried.

"Sundays and Mondays're usually quiet anyway. Avery can handle that and any straightforward shoeing that comes in. Anyone with special problems will just have to wait until I get back. What can I do to help?"

Kim pondered this morsel of intel— _the woman was a blacksmith?_

Young Doc outlined his needs to his sister, who nodded her head in accordance.

Slim stood up. "Godda ged drezzed... god stog do veed."

Young Doc harrumphed, rummaging around in his black bag. "You, my friend, are not feeding stock or doing anything but going straight back to bed. You're _sick_ , in case you hadn't noticed. Here, drink this..." He handed over another brown bottle.

"Dow?"

"Yes... now. All of it. Then wash your face and hands... and hair while you're at it. Doesn't look like we got all the horse slobber out of it last night."

"Horse slobber?" Sally questioned. "Do I even want to know?"

Slim chugged down the medicine, gagging and making a face. "Wad dis?"

"Never you mind. It'll make you feel better."

A howl from the back bedroom rent the air, distracting everyone.

 **Sally snickered. "Look out, world** —Jess Harper's awake. He's mad as hell and he ain't gonna take it no more."

Young Doc grinned at his sister. "Bet I know what _his_ problem is! You wanna flip to see who takes care of that or...?"

"No contest! You do it. _I'll_ take care of Slim. Andy, would you get me a washcloth and some towels... oh... and soap and his shave things, too."

"Sure, Miss Sally!" The boy followed the doctor into the second bedroom, coming back in two shakes of a lamb's tail with the requested items. Sally took a large enameled wash basin from under the work counter and filled it with hot water from the stove, then crooked a finger at Slim. "Okay, big guy... let's get this over with!"

The tall rancher didn't object. Pulling off the top of his longjohns, he obediently leaned his head over the basin, bracing his hands on the countertop while the tall woman soaped and rinsed his blonde hair. While he washed up and toweled his hair, she busied herself working up lather in the shave mug and giving the straight razor a good stropping. He demurred when she ordered him to bring up a chair and sit so she could do the honors. "Don't be silly. The way your hands are shaking you'd cut your throat at the first sneeze!" Slim sat.

Kim filed these intimacies away for later reference, with a pang of regret that the doctor's delectable sister obviously had some sort of prior involvement with Slim Sherman even though she was evidently already spoken for by someone called Avery. The husband? She wasn't wearing a wedding ring.

A few minutes later, a much-refreshed Slim was chivvied back to his bedroom and the doctor had taken his place at the table. Sally leveled her gaze at Andy. "You're next!" She insisted he wash his hair (over his objections) and stood by with a fresh towel until the boy was done.

Instead of sending Andy back to bed, Young Doc called him back to the table. "Come sit for a minute and let's talk, man to man."

Andy's eyes rounded but he did as told. Young Doc slouched down in his chair a little so that he was at eye level with the youngster, using his peer approach to elicit cooperation. Sally admiringly referred to this as _kiddieschmoozing_. Worked like a charm every time.

"Now... I _was_ gonna tell you to go on back to bed... but I have this problem, see... and I really need your help. I hate to ask, seein' as how you're not feeling so good yourself but..."

Andy was all ears and rapt attention. "Whatever you want me to do, Doctor Whatleigh, I can do it!"

"Good man! I knew I could count on you! Now, Miss Sally's gonna stay until I can get some people out here to help... but she's gonna be pretty busy taking care of the stock first and fixin' up breakfast and lunch for everyone later. Somebody has to look after Jess and Jonesy 'cause they can't get out of bed. Dya think you can help 'em use the thundermug when they need it, and make sure they have water by their bedsides?"

"Yessir! I can do that." Andy was already swelling with importance.

"Shouldn't he be resting, Fred?" Sally put in.

"Yes... of course... but, Andy... remember you're sick, too, so if you start feeling bad, I want you to go and lie down for a while and take a nap."

Andy turned to Sally hesitantly. "Are you gonna do my chores, too, Miss Sally? Like milk Deecy? She can be real ornery..."

"I reckon I can get Miss Deecy to see things my way, Andy... hey, why don't you write me out a list of your usual chores in the order they need to be done? Then I'll know exactly what to do."

"Sure thing, Miss Sally!"

Young Doc took over again. "Here's another thing... and this is really important, too, Andy..."

"Yeah? I mean, yessir?"

"It's about Jess... he's gonna hate being cooped up and he's gonna get bored somethin' awful lying in bed all day. Maybe you could take some books in there and read to him, keep him company for a while so he won't get lonely? And when he needs a nap, you can go read to Jonesy."

"Okay. Only... I ain't... haven't... ever seen Jess read a book... how would I know what he likes?"

"Why don't you start with your favorite and see how that works out?"

Sally interceded. "Andy... first, would you go over to the desk and get started on that list for me?"

"Yes m'am!" Andy hopped up and bustled over to the far side of the parlor where Slim did his paperwork.

Young Doc caught his sister eyeing her next victim with intent. "You can throw that one back in the pond, Sis... he's already clean!" he chuckled.

Sally marched over and bold as brass leaned over to sniff the top of Kim's head, then whipped a large comb out of a pocket. "That may well be but he damned sure could use a good currying!" Which was true... his thick mane was a mare's nest of knots and tangles... and he couldn't lift his arms to get at them.

Kim looked to the doctor in alarm, showing the whites of his eyes, and Young Doc laughed out loud. "Resistance is useless, kid. Might as well let her have her way with you."

 **Kim sat stoically** as Sally gently tugged her way through one snarl after another. After a while he started to relax. It was pleasant, having a woman's fingers running through his hair again... it had been a while, after all. _Must be what a dog feels, why he gets all goofy when his human gives him a good scratching around the ears... or at that Sweet Spot right above the base of the tail..._ Without comment she picked apart the tiny braid and deposited the ragged remains of the osprey feather on the table. Kim felt himself drifting into an almost hypnotic state. When she announced he needed trimming as well, he couldn't summon up the energy to contradict her. She asked Andy to bring her a pair of scissors and a mirror.

In the meantime, Young Doc got up to repack his medical kit, inventorying the remaining drugs and dispensing instructions. "Sally... there's treatment plans for everyone here on the table and the key to the drug chest. There's no more morphine left and very little laudanum, so you need to be stingy about doling it out. I'd say Jess gets top priority—he has to be still until the cast hardens, then Jonesy if he has another attack of cramps, then your little buddy there but only if he looks like he needs it."

Young Doc returned to the kitchen table and pointed a finger at Kim. "You... don't pick up anything heavy or try to bend over. Every few minutes you need to try and take a real deep breath. It'll hurt but do it anyway because you want to maintain lung function and not get lung fever. If you have to cough, hold a pillow against your chest like so..." Young Doc demonstrated. "You can move around the room—in fact, the longer you can stay on your feet or at least upright, the better—but don't walk around outside and don't bump into anything because if you do, you die. Understood?"

Kim hesitantly nodded yes, fine-sorting this shower of information and directives. _Weren't physicians supposed to be a little more... supportive and circumspect?_ 'Oh, by the way, you might die. Pass the butterbeans, please' _seemed a bit insensitive. Being stuck here for eight to twelve weeks was too depressing for words and tantamount to a death warrant—surely he'd be discovered before then and hastened to his next incarnation._

"Don't move!" Sally thumped him on the head. "And don't look so hangdog... this is a nice quiet place to recuperate. Isn't that right, Andy?" she called out.

Andy turned around in his chair at the desk, thinking of all the violent incidents that had occurred since Jess' arrival... but he caught on quickly and suppressed a giggle. "Yes m'am, that's right... nothing _ever_ happens around here. Peaceful as the grave."

Young Doc was gathering up his clothing, about to retreat to the front bedroom to get dressed, and Andy was just finishing up his chore list when Sally applied the final touches to her tonsorial administrations, patting Kim on the shoulder. "There! All done!"

"Thank you." The words were out of Kim's mouth before he realized he'd said anything. Young Doc and Andy gaped in astonishment and Sally dropped her scissors on the floor, exclaiming, "I'll be dipped...!"

"You can _talk!_ " Andy squeaked in excitement.

"Told you it was only temporary!" Young Doc exulted. "That's encouraging... very encouraging. Looks like you're gonna make it after all."

Kim was embarrassed all over again. They were all behaving as if he were a toddler who'd uttered his first 'mama'. Andy came over to stand beside him. "How come you couldn't talk before?"

"Dunno..." Kim shrugged.

"Is your name really Sky Lizard? Should I call you Mister Lizard or can I call you Sky?"

Before Kim could answer, Sally leaned over and bussed him on the cheek. "What matters is that you can talk _now._ "

"Must be your magic touch, Sis... you could bring a dead man to life!" Young Doc kidded his sister.

"Yeah... so I've been told... but it wasn't from cutting his hair!"

"Sally!"

 **Sally held up the shaving mirror** so Kim could admire his new look. Reduced to shirt-collar length and still longer than any other male's in the house, his unruly thatch was now somewhere between dark blonde and pale brown—sun-bleached sheep-like curls littered the floor. Andy observed it critically and then spied the forlorn discarded feather.

"Wait a minute!" Andy ordered. He slipped into the front bedroom, careful not to disturb Jonesy, and rummaged around in his treasure chest until he found what he wanted—a contour feather from a blue heron, in perfect condition. Bearing it triumphantly to the kitchen, he presented it to Kim's barber with, "I don't know if this means anything, Sky, but you just don't look right without it!"

"You're right... he don't," Sally agreed, expertly weaving it in place. The turquoise blue contrasted nicely with Kim's amber eyes, which looked even larger and more brilliant without the great mass of hair shadowing them, and made his brown skin seem even darker.

Kim looked in the mirror again and produced a semblance of a smile. "It does mean something. Thanks."

"Hey, I just thought a somethin'! Andy cut in with a worried look.

"Problem?" Sally asked.

"Yeah... when I get well and have to be doin' my own chores again... and Jess' and Jonesy's... I ain't gonna have time to sit around readin' to 'em. So I was thinkin' maybe Sky'll have to do some a that since he ain't no dummy after all... I mean mute... if he can read and write, that is. How about it, Sky... can ya?"

Sally was thinking how Slim would be raking Andy over the grammatical coals.

Kim fixed him with an owl-eyed stare and intoned with a perfectly straight face, "Sky Lizard read and write heap good." Sally burst out laughing along with Andy and Young Doc. The only one not laughing was Kim himself, who was feeling like a perfect jackass. _What on earth had possessed him?_

"Then you and him can get to be friends while you're doin' it," Andy added helpfully.

Young Doc sobered up quickly. "That probably wouldn't be a good idea just yet..." he suggested delicately because that was prying open the lid of a big old jar of touchy subject.

"Why not... oh... I get it... because Sky's a halfbreed? Yeah... you're right... Jess might shoot him or somethin'."

The silence that followed lasted an eternity. Out of the mouths of babes.

"Who told you that?" Sally finally asked.

"Slim did, last night in the barn... he said Jonesy and Jess think breeds can't be trusted and... what?"

Young Doc and Sally were looking appalled. Kim was studying the table top. Sally was thinking how Slim would have a conniption if he'd heard such a rude comment in front of a guest.

"Nothing..." Sally finally said. "We'll talk about it later. Go and finish that list for me so I can get started."

Andy returned to other side of the room, feeling he'd made a _faux pas_ but not sure how.

"Sorry!" brother and sister mouthed simultaneously.

Kim shrugged, his face impassive.

 _CHAPTER TEN—PART TWO_

 **IN THE RANCH HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN**

" _ **The pain will go away when it stops hurting."**_ _(Unidentified nurse)_

 **Sunup...** "I hate to leave you all in this fix but the sooner I go the sooner I can get back with reinforcements." Young Doc stepped out onto the porch, Kim following with short, halting steps. Andy trailed behind in case Kim needed support. Sally had just led Fancy up to the steps where the mare jigged between the shafts of the Amish buggy, ready to roll out. Slim, Jess and Jonesy had all gone back to sleep—the latter two with chemical assistance.

Young Doc directed his next statement at Kim. "A word to the wise. The nurse I'm hoping to send out is a bit... eccentric. Very competent, however... knows more than I do. Whatever she says goes. Don't give her any trouble or you might not live to regret it. Look... I gotta go. By the way, nice tattoo." With that, Young Doc clambered into the buggy and drove off. Sally turned away and headed back to the barn.

Lemony rays of sunshine were spilling across the mountain tops in the distance. Yesterday's rain had scrubbed the air clean and the commingled scents of evergreens, grasses, sagebrush and manure were borne on a light breeze, uncommonly warm for this late autumn morning. In the pasture across the road, Kim spotted his pony—the only dun in a band of chestnuts and bays and one magnificent sooty black mare.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary about Sally's horse...**_ _As all the Whatleigh's personal mounts had to be oversize for obvious reasons, Sally's mare was a crossbred Thoroughbred-Percheron. Her name was Tar Baby after the Rancho La Brea tar pits in California.)_

 **Kim was gratified to see** his faithful steed moving freely and showing little aftereffects of yesterday's ordeal, which alleviated a worry almost as great as the possibility of a premature reunion with his ancestors. He was pleased about regaining his speech and feeling marginally better than he had two hours ago. Even _that_ blessing had come with a price (nothing's free in this world!) and that was a full-on blast of recollection as to why he was here in Wyoming in the first place... and what had happened yesterday.

His thoughts were interrupted by Andy offering to show him the way to the privy, on the grounds that the doctor's orders to stay indoors surely didn't preclude visits to the necessary. For a sick kid he was certainly full of noise—chattering away nonstop, pausing only to cough or wipe his nose... and scratch. It must be awfully lonely, having so much to say and no one to say it to except three grown-ups who likely didn't have a lot of spare time to listen. On the way back Andy detoured to show off his menagerie with a synopsis as to how each critter had come under his care. He confided his intention to become a veterinarian and his brother's plan to send him away to prep school in St. Louis the following year.

Sally was nearby, surrounded by chickens anxiously awaiting a scattering of feed from the pail she was holding. She paused to scold Andy and 'Sky' about being outdoors in contradiction of the doctor's orders, but smiled when Andy asked her about breakfast. Why yes, she'd be pleased as punch if he'd go ahead and get it started! She'd be in soon as she'd collected the eggs and milked the cow.

Just the idea of food made Kim want to hurl. His ribs were thrumming like kettle drums. When they returned to the house he asked Andy to hoist his saddlebags onto the fainting couch as he couldn't do it himself. Since there didn't seem to be any prospect of pain medication on offer, marijuana would have to do. Andy excused himself to the kitchen and disappeared into the root cellar.

Taking panoramic stock of his surroundings, Kim wondered how he was going to entertain himself for the rest of the day. What he needed was something to take his mind off his predicament... and there was a tall bookcase on the far side of the room toward the back wall...

 **The bookcase contained** an eclectic and surprisingly comprehensive library including textbooks on a wide variety of subjects, a just-published Collins Student's Atlas, an 1847-edition Merriam-Webster dictionary, George Dadd's _American Cattle Doctor_ (published 1851) and _Modern Horse Doctor_ (published 1854), military field surgical manuals (both Union and Confederate), _Dr. Chase's Recipes, or Information for Everybody_ (Dr. A.W. Chase), the _Housekeeper's Encyclopedia_ (Mrs. E.F. Haskell), and many other tomes of practical knowledge. Two lower shelves held back copies of _The New England Journal of Medicine_ and _American Veterinary Review_ (journal of the seven-year-old American Medical Veterinary Association). The bottom two shelves were stuffed with dime novels. Kim was modestly impressed but also disappointed not to find anything more intellectually satisfying in the area of fiction. An initial attempt to reach one of the pulp novels reminded him that bending over and down was both problematic and painful.

Drifting to the bedroom door immediately to his right, Kim put his ear against it and heard labored breathing punctuated by coughs and someone else's rhythmic snores. On the other side of a writing desk the next door yielded a lighter snore, the deeper arrhythmic aspirations of the old man. At this point the only thing between Kim and the front door was a curious triangular cabinet in the corner with one of its doors slightly ajar… enough to reveal a book spine. Inching the door open, his mouth fell open... _the motherlode!_

Books, books and more books... novels, autobiographies, biographies, anthologies, collected works... most of them handsomely bound in muted colors of leather and neatly alphabetized by author! With the exception of a few new ones, all had spine creases indicating repeated usage. Kim was enthralled... who in this backwater read all these books? Complete editions of Shakespeare and all the major GrecoRoman philosophers. Many old friends were there... Carroll's _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , Darwin's _On the Origin of Species_ , Dostoyevky's _Crime and Punishment_ , Dumas' _Three Musketeers_ , Hugo's _Les Misérables_ , Swift's _Gulliver's Travels_ , Verne's _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,_ Whitman's _Leaves of Grass..._

For starters he pulled out and set aside two recent publications already on his must-read list—Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ (rave reviews!) and Twain's _The Innocents Abroad_. He did like him some Twain. The prospect of weeks of confinement didn't seem so daunting now—assuming he wasn't tracked down and dispatched to Valhalla before he was able to hit the road again.

 **Suddenly Kim spied,** through the slot left vacant by his removal of _War and Peace_ , something familiar: the tooled leather sheaths of his knives, hidden behind the row of books. Obviously someone had stashed them there, but to what purpose? He decided they were best left where they were and put _Innocents_ back in to fill the gap.

Kim had noted a rocking chair conveniently situated on the porch... the perfect place to settle down with a book. Young Doc had warned 'do not _walk_ around outside'. Nothing was said about _sitting_. Or toking, for that matter.

Aware that he was becoming uncomfortably warm, Kim was confronted with yet another difficulty—the lurid pink union suit. Now Kim came from a tropical climate where most folks (discounting the missionaries) dispensed with underpinnings altogether and had never even seen an item as claustrophobically restrictive as a union suit. (Personally, he preferred going commando even in cold-climate countries.) So Kim set the book down and looked around for his shirt and denims, which were nowhere to be seen—perhaps squirreled away in the household laundry basket, wherever that might be. He couldn't very well take the damned thing off entirely and go about starkers with a female on the premises. So he took his makin's outside along with his literary selection and did the best he could after settling down in the rocker—gingerly squirming out of the top portion, rolling it down around his waist and tying the two sleeves together in front. It was an improvement.

All through the earlier trudge to the convenience and back, the pain had continued unabated although Kim was able to disregard it to some extent, now that he had other things to occupy his mind. (And of course a big fat doobie helped a lot.) But it had worn him out. The sun felt good on his abused torso and he fell sound asleep only a few pages into the ponderous tome. He woke up briefly when Sally clomped onto the porch with two brimming pails of milk. She stopped to ask if he wanted some and he thought maybe he could keep some milk down, so she brought him a glassful on her way back out. Andy woke him up again to see if he wanted breakfast, which he didn't. Then he nodded off again and didn't awaken when the canary yellow fringe-topped two-bench surrey drawn by a perfectly matched pair of Morgan geldings and containing three ladies rolled right up to the hitch rail in front of the porch and stopped.


	11. Chapter 11

_CHAPTER ELEVEN—PART ONE_

 **BRING ME THE HEAD OF THE EASTER BUNNY**

" _ **Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."**_ _(Mark Twain)_

 _(_ _ **Gracie's introduction to the doctor's aunt...**_ _Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo was a woman of mature years [sixty but who's counting?] and independent means. Standing a full six feet with a no-nonsense manner, she would have made a great head matron at a school for delinquent females or wardress in a boys correctional facility._

 _Emmaline was an intelligent free-thinking feminist—a woman ahead of her time—who first attended the progressively liberal [or liberally progressive—your choice] Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio but transferred, in disgust, to Salem College in North Carolina upon discovering women were not admitted to the baccalaureate program at Oberlin. Shortly after graduating with dual degrees in philosophy and physiology, Emmaline became enamored of one Signore Giancarlo Giancomo, a prospective American citizen who believed [erroneously] that Winston-Salem, North Carolina was at a far enough remove from his home court of Palermo, Sicily to afford refuge from certain business associates who objected strenuously to his unauthorized appropriation of a significant portion of their liquid assets. He and Emmaline eloped about six months before the brotherhood of Il Mano Nigro zeroed in on his location, forcing him to flee sans wife or valise, the contents of which had quadrupled in value due his expertise in his chosen trade of gambler. He was never seen or heard from again. An apologetic representative later informed Emmaline that for her troubles she was free to keep the money—it was the principle that mattered._

 _Deciding she was done with until-death-do-us-part and henceforth would deal only in select limited alliances as desired, Emmaline invested a portion of her unexpected fortune in railroad stock and pork belly futures with a New York brokerage firm and returned to Charleston with her infant son. She accompanied her brother on the family's trek west, eventually purchasing an enormous house next door to his when he made Laramie his permanent residence. There she put some of her money into savings and established—as co-proprietor with her girlhood chum from Charleston, one Vidalia Shallot—a popular hospitality establishment for gentlemen in the red lantern district of downtown Laramie._

 _This short-term rental business proved profitable enough to cover all Emmaline's living expenses plus allowing her to indulge in philanthropic pursuits without ever having to touch her capital. Emmaline was far too educated and energetic to waste her valuable time lolling about on chaise-longues nibbling bon-bons while peeping through a lorgnette and lace curtains at the working world outside. Instead, this versatile lady took up practical nursing in her brother Old Doc's clinic on weekdays, which career continued into her nephew Young Doc's reign._

 _Emmaline was afflicted with what was later coined dissociative identity—or multiple personality—disorder. She maintained at least four distinct personas besides her core personality. Most folks were aware of two and some few of three—those very close to her by kinship or friendship were accustomed to interacting in concert with whichever one was at the helm at any given moment. Of course, no one ever considered she might have a psychological dysfunction... they all just regarded her as eccentric._

 _Outside the office Nurse Emma was Missus Giancomo—widowed single mother, president of the Laramie League of Women Voters, treasurer of the Laramie Presbyterian Church's Ladies Auxiliary, co-founder of the Laramie Garden Club, and valued frequent shopper in the town's boutiques._

 _On Friday and Saturday nights [Madam Vidalia's nights off], Madam Aline patrolled her co-owned domain with hauteur and an iron fist in a velvet glove, a force to be reckoned with in black bombazine from chin to toe with purple ostrich plumes adorning her towering pompadour of crimped curls. The sheriff couldn't remember when he'd last been called upon to quell a disturbance at the Prairie Rose, the two madams being on it 24/7._

 _When she wasn't being one of the above, Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo was Emmaline or Auntie Emma to relatives and Miss Emma to friends. Having been apprised of the Sherman situation, Emmaline had risen to the occasion by volunteering to serve as Director of Nursing Operations for the duration of the emergency, having arranged a leave of absence from her other business._

 **Noon...** Before disembarking the vehicle, Emmaline took a few moments to perform a visual recce of the site. Aside from a notable absence of human activity (other than her niece Sally, who was busy stoking up the fire under the washboiler in the side yard next to the house), all appeared in good order. Chickens were industriously foraging for grubs and worms in the yard. In the corral two pairs of horses dozed in the usual head-to-tail configuration, swishing flies. Across the road other horses had returned to grazing after pausing to regard the new arrivals. Other than the steady _chuk-chuk-clukkk_ of the chickens and the susurrus of cottonwood leaves in the breeze, it was eerily quiet. The only things out of the ordinary were a lack of smoke emanating from the cookstove chimney pipe... and whatever that was camped on the front porch.

Taking up her workbasket from its place between herself and her niece-in-law Pearl, Emmaline stepped squelchily down into the mud and noiselessly up onto the porch. Setting the basket down, she poised hands on hips to study this slumbering vision in pink with a blue feather stuck in his hair—obviously the young halfbreed with the broken ribs that her nephew had told her about (the virulent aubergine purple of his bare midsection sort of gave that away). The way the pink union suit was rolled down to his waist with the knotted sleeves flopping out to either side gave the impression he had in his lap the guillotined head of the Easter Bunny. Other than that he looked mostly normal and even adorable in a boyish sort of way. She noted the glass half-full of milk and buzzing with flies atop the 1,440-page volume on the floor.

Kim was dreaming he was marinating on a beach in Bora Bora under a coconut palm when a cloud suddenly obscured the sun. He cocked open one eye in irritation to find the sunlight had indeed been blocked out by an immense apparition towering above him with an expression on her face as if he were something what just fell out of a yak's nose.

Her head was crowned with silver-and-pewter plaits wrapped around and around in a corona held in place by what appeared to be chopsticks. The buttons of her white cotton blouse strained alarmingly over a massive bosom and its voluminous sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Below that a sensible blue cotton twill divided riding skirt ended at mid-calf over a pair of men's work boots. Kim made a mental tick beside 'Woman You Would Not Want To Meet In A Dark Alley'. He concluded that (a) this Amazon must certainly be the owner of the elephantine pink underwear and (b) she was indubitably related to Young Doc and Sally, possibly their mother?

From far above she was orating in a voice as stentorious as a lumberjack's. "Young man, where are your clothes?"

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Emmaline had already heard about the laundry incident and laughed until she couldn't. It was all she could do to not break out in giggles now... and Emmaline was most emphatically not a giggler.)_

" **Um... they... uh... I don't know."** Well, it was the truth. Kim started to get up.

"As you were. I'm aware of your condition. I'm Missus Emmaline Giancomo but you may refer to me as _Miss Emma_ or _Nurse Emma_. I'm Doctor Whatleigh's aunt and I'm here to take charge. I believe you are called Sky Lizard?"

Kim sank gratefully back into the rocker. "Thank you, m'am. Yes, m'am." The woman had spoken his adopted name as casually as if she were saying 'Jimmy Jones' or 'Sam Smith' with no inflection whatsoever to indicate distaste or even recognition that she was dealing with a detested halfbreed.

"You may as well stay where you are, Mister Lizard, and out of the way while Peach unloads the buggy. I'm going to look in on the other patients first and I'll get back to you in a few minutes."

"Yes, m'am. That's fine."

A commotion broke out somewhere in the back of the house—someone was very, very upset and that unseen person sounded both desperate and dangerous. Miss Emma seemed unperturbed. "You have milk on your upper lip, Mister Lizard."

"Yes, m'am. Thank you, m'am."

Kim wiped his mouth on a pink sleeve while Emmaline unlaced her boots and replaced them with felt slippers before ducking into the house, carrying her basket. He looked on as an attractive young Chinese woman remaining onboard the surrey handed down boxes, baskets and valises to an unattractive prune-faced old Chinese woman he surmised must be the Peach in question, who shuttled them to the porch. Reminding Kim of his _tai-po_ —his great-grandmother Meihui—the tiny woman's sparse gray hair was skinned back from her face in a thin queue rolled into an misshapen bun at the back of her head, also skewered by chopsticks. She was wearing a traditional black _ao_ and _qun_ with untraditional boy's high-top brogans and steadily muttering very traditional oaths in Cantonese as she squished back and forth through the mud, ignoring Kim after one fierce scowl. When the last of the cargo had been transferred to the porch, Peach also removed her streetwear and donned felt slippers before carrying the first basket indoors.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _Few people know this but a good pair of heavy-duty chopsticks is almost as useful as a Swiss Army knife... you can eat with 'em, stab anything crawlin' off your plate, dig wax outta your ears, poke holes in the tops of evaporated milk cans, use 'em as hair-stylin' aids, and they come in real handy in self-defense situations like when some impatient lout's crowdin' you too close in a movie theater line. A chopstick can also be used to test a patient's reflexes. About the only thing you can't do with 'em is open a beer bottle.)_

 **The unidentified other woman** took up the reins, flashing Kim a radiant smile before backing up the rig and departing. She was attired in a Western-style sprigged muslin dress and her glossy black hair was piled high in a fashionable pompadour. Kim would later find out this was Young Doc's wife Pearl.

Rather than reassuring our traveler that he wasn't the only slanteye in town, the presence of Peach and Pearl only added to his sense of inevitable woe. He had not expected to find a Chinese community in the outback... and wherever two or more Chinese were gathered gossip was sure to flow. Word of his presence would be on the grapevine by sundown and across the big pond in two weeks or less, depending on trade winds. He was doomed. _Don't think about it._

Kim settled back, wedging his bare feet against one of the uprights supporting the porch rail and reimmersing himself in Anna Pavlovna Scherer's 1805 St. Petersburg soirée, with one ear tuned to the interesting noises coming from inside the house.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's notes concerning Peach and Pearl...**_ _Chen Chuntao, country girl, arrived in Hong Kong many moons ago in a shipment of Oriental odalisques destined for the Pearl of the Orient's flesh trade. Her name meant 'Spring Peach' and her father bartered her for a brace of fighting roosters and four laying hens. Her pimp later sold her to a Scots sailor by the name of Archibald McNutt who, in a fit of mental aberration [temporarily forgetting he already had a wife and six children back home in Argyll], married her and brought her halfway around the world to Charleston, where he suddenly recalled his previous obligations and sailed away, never to be seen again and not knowing he'd left behind a memento of this dalliance. Chuntao didn't know it yet, either._

 _Chuntao was not an attractive female by any stretch of the imagination and had no English, so had to fall back on the only marketable skill she possessed, which entailed falling on her back quite often. Old Doc at that time was the primary health care provider to several of the town's high-end cathouses, and when he informed Chuntao's employer that her new Chinese whore was up the spout, the madam had to let her go—regretfully, as Chuntao was a dependable money-earner despite her less than salubrious countenance._

 _Old Doc felt sorry for the destitute prostitute, who at thirty years of age had already surpassed her sell-by date as a social services worker and was preggers in the bargain. He had no need of a private_ fille de joie _—being a bit of a roué and very popular among Charleston's ladies of negotiable affections—so he brought her home to his humorless wife Eunice as a prospective servant trainee. Herself in the throes of morning sickness, Eunice wanted no part of a non-Irish housemaid. His sister Emmaline, however—sympathetic to the woman's plight and in need of a housekeeper and nanny to her infant son Luca—anglicized the luckless lassie's name to 'Peach' and undertook to train her in the domestic arts. The arrival of Lindsay McNutt coincided with the birth of Old Doc Whatleigh's son Wilfred. Eunice did not survive the experience so Peach added wet nurse to her new occupations as amah, mother and cook/housekeeper. The three boys were raised as brothers. It was a win-win situation for everyone except Eunice._

 _Four-foot and some change Peach probably didn't weigh more than eighty-five pounds soaking wet but had the tenacity of a rat terrier and the determination of a truffle pig. Peach would also be staying over in the role of interim cook/housekeeper and performer of other duties as assigned by her mistress._

 _Wing Mingzhu [Pearl] was Wing Chen Li's favorite daughter Number Three by his legitimate wife Liu [Willow] [as opposed to one of his concubines] and wife to Young Doc Whatleigh. Pearl was witty, intelligent and beautiful. Freddy had known her since she was a spat and the minute she hit the marriage-appropriate age of fifteen he approached Mr. Wing and asked for her hand, to his own father's great consternation. Mr. Wing liked Freddy and had daughters to spare. Taking into consideration the advantages of having a tame physician in the family he agreed to a standard Western-style ceremony in the Presbyterian Church. Exhausted from having recently presided over full-blown Eastern-style nuptials for daughters One, Two and Four, Mrs. Wing also agreed to skip the traditional rituals and forego the bride price. The promise of pro bono lifetime medical services to the Wing family [including servants] was quite enough and they certainly didn't need any additional pigs or chickens._

 _No one asked Pearl's opinion but she was a dutiful daughter and in any case very much in love with the hulking great gweilo. The match was a success and Pearl was very happy with Freddy and their shoe-button-eyed children, a boy and a girl. Employing one of her half-sisters [by one of the concubines] as amah to the kids, Pearl served as her husband's receptionist and substitute nurse as needed. Pearl's job was to serve as courier and quartermistress between ranch and town and sub for Emmaline at the clinic.)_

 _CHAPTER ELEVEN—PART TWO_

 **PATIENCE VERSUS PATIENTS**

" _ **Not all patients are annoying. Some are dead."**_ _(Unidentified Nurse)_

 **Shortly thereafter...** After contemplating the mess in the southeast corner of the parlor (reminding herself to remind Freddy that neatness counts), the very first thing Emmaline did was put on her utility apron—designed by herself after the fashion of a carpenter's apron with its many pockets and slots for specialty tools, infinitely more useful than the standard housewife's work apron. (It even had a special pocket for a cork-stoppered test tube filled with alcohol for sterilizing thermometers in between patients.) Into these pockets Emmaline distributed the contents of her traveling nurse's kit and prepared to transform herself into _Nurse Emma_. As to the escalating volume of discontent coming from the back bedroom, she determined that anyone conscious enough to create that much disturbance wasn't in immediate need of attendance.

With clipboard in hand and four of Eberhard Faber's finest writing instruments sharpened to rapier points firmly inserted in her corona, _Nurse Emma_ retrieved her nephew's five lists from under the sugar bowl on the parlor table. She swiftly reviewed the patients' particulars and treatment plans and interleaved them with the as yet blank patient charts (which she herself had devised and had printed for use in the Whatleigh clinic). Emmaline's relationship to the next four individuals is complicated so do try to keep up...

 **Sickroom Number One...** Andy was reading yesterday's newspaper to Jonesy. _Nurse Emma_ bustled in without knocking, addressing Andy with a tart 'Good morning, Andrew' and a barrage of personal interrogatories that made him blush. She peered in his mouth with a tongue depressor and noted the Koplik spots, then had him unbutton the placket of his nightshirt so that she could inspect his chest and back, finding exactly what she'd expected—a blotchy reddish-brown landscape with pinkish-red stripes where he'd been scratching at it. (Thankfully she didn't make him pull up the nightshirt.)

"Didn't Doctor Whatleigh tell you not to scratch?"

"I couldn't help it."

"We'll just see about that!"

After ticking boxes and making notations on his chart, she produced her curved-tip manicure scissors and sat down on the bed beside Andy, trimming his fingernails down to the quick. She stuck a thermometer in his mouth and reminded him not to bite it. "I'll be back later with the calamine lotion."

 _(_ **Gracie's note...** _Andy knew her only as the formidable_ Nurse Emma _from Doctor Whatleigh's office—a starchy avalanche in a white long-sleeved dress with high collar, cuffs up to the elbows, pinafore and a little organdy cap trimmed in lace. He had never seen_ Missus Giancomo _in her street clothes and it took him a few minutes to make the connection. He of course knew nothing of_ Madam Aline _or her business affiliation.)_

 **Nurse Emma then turned** to Jonesy, who upon hearing her voice had moaned and pulled the quilt over his head. "Angel of Death, take me now!"

"Very funny. How are we feeling?" (Followed by the standard questions and more ticks and notations.) "Later on I'll send Peach in to give you a backrub. Don't argue with me about it and don't give her any sass."

"Emmaline, just go away. Let me die in peace."

"You wish!" Retrieving her thermometer from Andy, she made a notation, dropped the item in her alcohol tube and departed the room.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Jonesy knew all of Emmaline's faces, their being very dear old friends with benefits. In younger and more athletic years the benefits generally took the form of Saturday afternoon trysts in Emmaline's private apartments, after which the lady prepared herself for her moonlight occupation as the part-owner/weekend doyenne of the Prairie Rose Gentleman's Club and the gentleman returned home with the spoils of the day's market run. In recent years the assignations had become fewer and farther between, mostly due to his escalating health problems and her busy schedule. And lest you think Jeb Jones was some kind of cad and bounder—him having been a married man and all—he didn't take up with Emmaline until a year after Elizabeth Jones had decamped to St. Louis with daughter Alice, having tired of the hardships of pioneer life.)_

 **Sickroom Number Two...** In the meantime, Slim and Jess had been waging war on each other in their adjacent beds. Slim's illness had progressed to massive esophagopharyngeal congestion, as if the viruses had interrupted their bronchial advance to hold a barn dance. His head was pulsating. He was burning with fever and his voice nearly gone. If he lay on his back, phlegm collected in the back of his throat and made him choke and cough. If he rolled over onto his side, his nose leaked and he drooled on the pillow.

When Jess had awakened the first time, he was confused at finding himself not only unable to roll over but with hard little scabs all over his face and stuck in his hair. In the pre-dawn darkness—when Young Doc helped him out with a nature call before knocking him out with laudanum-laden coffee—he'd failed to notice he was attired in petal pink longjohns. But when he woke up the second time, with daylight streaming through the window and just about the time the surrey was arriving, that fact _did_ come to his attention... and he let out such a bellow that rats in the root cellar trembled and chickens scratching in the yard scuttled for cover. He'd been railing nonstop for what seemed like forever to his beleaguered roommate.

Slim had been curled up with his back to Jess, unable to voice a complaint and trying unsuccessfully to block out the din by plugging a finger into his left ear. When he simply couldn't take it anymore he sat up, took the pitcher of water from the table between them and upended it on his partner. Then he lay back down and rolled back over. It wouldn't stop the aural bombardment but he felt a little better.

Screeching like a banshee and sputtering with indignation, Jess scrabbled around for something... anything... to throw back but was hampered by twenty pounds of plaster cast (felt like a hundred) anchoring his leg to the bed. His boots weren't by the side of the bed where he usually left them. As he couldn't have reached them anyway their absence was a moot point. What he _could_ reach, by stretching as far as he could, was the handle of that empty tin water pitcher... which although aimed for Slim's head bounced off his shoulder and clanged to the floor.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _A full-leg plaster cast normally weighs between twelve and fifteen pounds but as this was Young Doc's first go at making one, he erred on the side of prudence and followed the axiom 'more is better.' Give the man a break already! Ooops... I did_ NOT _mean to make that pun... it just slipped out!)_

 **Well, Slim came out** from under that eiderdown comforter in a fury and retaliated by beating Jess with his snot-encrusted pillow while Jess parried with his water-soaked one. Jess was cussing and Slim was croaking (actually, he was cussing too, only unintelligibly). Two things to keep in mind here: one being that since returning to bed that morning, a feverish and overheated Slim had shucked those longjohns and crawled back _au naturel_ between the sheets. The second thing is that an eiderdown quilt being as light as... well, eiderdown... has a tendency to float right off the bed if you don't keep a death grip on it and this one was now puddled on the floor instead of around Slim. Slim's pillow sprung a leak and a blizzard of feathers exploded into the room.

Right about that time _Nurse Emma_ steamed in with her eyes narrowed to slits and her lips pruned in disapproval. "GENTLEMEN! What _is_ going on in here? Stop this at once. This is not a playground!" Her roar would have stopped an oncoming train and it certainly derailed the two combatants as feathers swirled around them.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Slim knew_ Nurse Emma _and_ Missus Giancomo _. He didn't know_ Madam Aline _of the Prairie Rose but he'd heard rumors. When he felt the need to transact that sort of business, he took it to the Cheyenne Social Club some forty miles away where his face was relatively unknown other than by owners and acquaintances Mister John O'Hanlan and Mister Harley Sullivan. Slim hadn't visited the Social Club for some time, however, as he had a discreet arrangement with a certain Laramie entrepreneuress featuring monthly 'business junkets' via rail to Cheyenne, or occasionally to Denver, for a pleasurable extended weekend in a higher-starred hotel than Laramie afforded.)_

" **Mr. Sherman, cover yourself!** Mr. Harper, we will not tolerate that sort of language." (Note usage of the imperial _'we'_.)

Whipping a fresh pencil from her coiffure she started with Jess, whose responses were not the most polite. She pointed her pencil at him with nasty little jabbing motions. "Mister Harper, we would advise you to behave in a civil manner in future for the very simple reason that... _You. Are. At. Our. Mercy._ Do we make ourselves clear?"

"Yes, m'am." (Very small voice.)

Over in his own bed, Slim was listening with eager anticipation—an irresistible force was about to lock horns with an immovable object and he didn't want to miss the outcome.

"We are going to take your temperature now."

Now Jess had never had his temperature taken before and he didn't like the looks of that little glass tube. When she instructed him to put it in his mouth under his tongue, he had to open that big mouth and say something about it.

Nurse Emma fixed him with a basilisk stare and her voice dropped two octaves. "If Mister Harper doesn't want his temperature taken orally, we are sure we can arrange that it be taken some other way. But we don't think that he will like it." (Paraphrased, with a nod to Nurse Ratched of a later era.)

"Furthermore, if he persists in picking at his stitches we shall be forced to sew mittens onto his hands to prevent him from doing so." (His head bandage had come undone during the night and the mini-railroad track on his temple was in full view along with driblets of clotted blood where he'd been picking at it.)

While Jess lay there with his stubborn face on and the thermometer protruding from his lips, Slim's questionnaire was being completed with yes and no headshakes.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Jess didn't know_ Missus Giancomo _as she wasn't given to hanging around saloons and he rarely frequented boutiques. He didn't know_ Nurse Emma _as he avoided doctors' offices like the plague [pun intended]. He had encountered_ Madam Aline _only once, five months ago, and didn't recognize her without her ostrich plumes and maquillage. On that occasion he'd been rebuffed at the door with the advisory that the Rose did not admit his sort [ie. cowboys, drifters, gunfighters] but catered to a higher-class clientele [law enforcement officers, members of the bar, mercantile and banking institution managers, gentleman farmers and ranchers, as well as any sons of the above requiring initiation rites]. Jess henceforth took his business down the street to Irish Lily's Pleasure Palace, a multiservice establishment whose mission statement was 'Likker Up Front. Poker in the Rear'._

 _Emmaline certainly recognized Jess, having seen him about town on many occasions. She recalled her regret at having to deny him entrance to the Prairie Rose that time... he was an uncommonly toothsome lad but standards were standards. Of course, had she'd been thirty or forty years younger instead of old enough to be his grandmother, she would no doubt have lowered the bar without a second thought!)_

 **As a small, smug act of defiance,** Jess had that thermometer firmly clenched in his teeth instead of under his tongue as instructed and had his eyes screwed shut while savoring the moment. Therefore, he wasn't prepared when _Nurse Emma_ swished around the foot of the bed and yanked it out of his mouth. The bulb broke off but Jess was able to spit it out instead of swallowing it. Fortunately it was the alcohol thermometer rather than the mercury one. The taste was foul but it was worth it to see the look of disabelief on the old harridan's face. Or so he thought until he tasted blood trickling from a cut on his lower lip.

Over in his bed, Slim was chalking up round one to his wardmate but also relishing how dearly Jess was going to be paying for that little trick. Nurse Emma did not suffer fools.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Here's a glimpse at Nurse Emma's notes, starting with a legend (in alphabetical order) identifying her squad members (some of whom we haven't yet encountered): DW (Young Doc), FG (Lucky), FK (Feets), LM (Lychee), NE (Nurse Emma), OK (Oxtoe), PM (Peach), PW (Pearl), RK (Roop) and SL (Sally). Another legend indicated courses of treatment or attention—hygiene, for instance: SB (sponge bath), TB (tub bath), SV (shave), BT (brush teeth), OH (outhouse privileges), CP (chamberpot), BP (bedpan)... and physical management: RA (requires assistance), RI (requires insistence), RT (requires threats), RR (requires restraint), RS (requires sedation). She suspected the hygiene issue was going to be a source of rebellion... and she was right. She also reckoned a few of her patients (one in particular) would prove to be less than cooperative. She was right about that, too. In the weeks to come, Mister Harper's chart would reflect a disproportionate number of RI, RT, RR and RS entries. After her initial encounter with Jess, Nurse Emma added two new categories: HP (hostile patient) and UFIN (use force if necessary)._

 _As a committed ecologist/conservationist/environmentalist ahead of her time and autodidactical efficiency expert, Emmaline had devised this system of entering notes on her patient charts as a way of saving time and paper, which was expensive and not always readily available in those days. And just so you'll understand where Nurse Emma was coming from and not think 'What a [w]itch!'... well, she wasn't really mean-hearted, though not always as sympathetic as perhaps she ought to have been, but held very strong opinions about how the world should be ordered. She firmly believed that in order to command respect—from horses, dogs, children or recalcitrant men—one must establish one's authority right from the get-go.)_


	12. Chapter 12

_CHAPTER TWELVE—PART ONE_

 **GRAVITY AND A WARDROBE MALFUNCTION**

" _ **Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects."**_ _(Dave Barry)_

 **In the meantime...** Peach continued to ignore Kim as she scuffed out and in removing offloaded luggage to the interior, leaving in her wake a vapor trail of blue invective in her native tongue. With the last basket now indoors, Peach took up her battle station in the kitchen with a tremendous clashing of pots and pans. Through the open window above Kim's head poured an ongoing deprecatory and eloquently descriptive monologue about _gweilohs_ in general and their filthy kitchens specifically while in the background someone was loudly registering his displeasure from behind a closed door.

Kim closed his eyes for a few moments, imagining himself a child back in his _tai-po's_ kitchen, being fed sweetmeats as she simultaneously heaped abuse on the servants. Enticing aromas began tendriling out the window, causing Kim to realize that hunger pangs had overcome his earlier nausea. All he was smelling was chicken noodle soup and coffee but at this point he would have eaten a blackboard eraser. With all the commotion going on, though, Kim judged it might not be safe just yet to reenter the premises.

In the background the yelling was capped by a bellow of rage and the distinct sound of something metallic hitting the floor, followed by even louder shouting and muffled thumps. Shortly afterwards the commotion ceased abruptly and the only voice to be heard was Nurse Emma's. It was not a pleased voice.

It was then Kim determined to slip into the kitchen and beg for a morsel of something... anything. The extra-large union suit hung loosely on his slender frame and the rolled-up legs didn't want to stay rolled up. As he labored through the parlor, the knot in the sleeves worked its way loose and he made a grab for the suit before it got away from him. As people with injured torsos tend to do, he was holding one hand against his ribs and hanging onto the union suit with the other.

Now, when Kim went to put in his request and make _hezhang_ to his honorable elder, several unfortunate factors came into play: First, as he placed his palms together and bowed (or attempted to), the law of gravity took hold of that now unsecured union suit and it plummeted southwards, settling in accordion folds around his ankles. Second, he was immediately reminded, by the excruciating pain shooting northwards and exploding behind his eyeballs, of why he wasn't supposed to be bending over. Which left Kim in a rather awkward position, partly bowed over with hands clasped together in supplication, unable to catch his breath, right himself or reach down to pull his union suit back up. Ingloriously barearsed.

At first he thought the old lady was having a seizure. But what it was, was Peach being utterly confounded at having what she'd initially perceived to be a white boy first address her in perfect Cantonese with appropriate verbal and physical honorifics, then dropping trou. Peach, like her mistress, wasn't much on giggling and probably hadn't enjoyed a good belly laugh in several decades, but one of Vesuvian proportions began erupting now. Tears streamed down her seamed face and she was cackling so hard her uppers fell out and bounced under the cookstove. Of course, that would be the moment Nurse Emma chose to exit Sickroom Number Two and canter across the parlor toward the kitchen in a nimbus of pinfeathers, whereupon she was brought up short by the spectacle of a flying dragon over a full moon.

Now Nurse Emma (or any of her other faces) wasn't the sort to go all swoony over the sight of a man's unclothed buttocks—she'd seen enough of them in her lifetime—but this was bordering on the last straw after what she'd just had to put up with. Quick as a wink she stooped over and hauled that union suit right back up to Kim's armpits, giving him the mother of all wedgies. He squealed like a girl.

"We have GOT to find something else for you to wear!"

Peach meanwhile was getting back to her feet after retrieving her chompers from under the stove and rattling out a long string of something or other in Cantonese with an ear-to-ear grin on her face while Kim was going up in flames.

"No. Won Hung Low _cannot_ have a piece of toast. He will be returning to his seat on the porch—where we told him to stay—and we will let him know when and what he can eat. Come along, Mister Lizard!" With that Nurse Emma practically frog-marched him back outside, barking 'Sit!' followed by 'Stay!'

 **Still carrying her clipboard** and having abruptly segued into _Miss Emma_ , Emmaline sat on the bench next to the rocker where Kim was trying to identify which hurt the most: his ribs, his pride, or his _huevos_. Too, he was just the tiniest bit confused, not being aware (yet) of the hopscotching personalities.

"As long as I'm here, we might as well go over your chart," Miss Emma said quite nicely.

"Yes, m'am," he squeaked.

"First of all, how are you feeling?"

He was going to say that he'd had better days and that near-castration hadn't improved things any, but amended his answer to, "Like the tenth circle of hell, m'am... but only when I laugh."

Caught off guard by the unexpected literary allusion, Emmaline exclaimed, "There is no tenth circle!" _A halfbreed buck who knows Dante?!_

"Well, if there was one, I'd be in it..."

"Have you had any medication today?"

"No, m'am."

"Do you feel you need some?"

"Yes, m'am... but if it's a choice between that and food... I'm pretty hungry." The mouth-watering aroma of biscuits in the oven was wafting out the window.

"Lunch is almost ready. It would be best if you limited your intake to light fare for a few days until we see how well your system tolerates returning to a normal diet. You want to avoid vomiting as that would be quite painful."

"Yes, m'am... already found that out."

A ghost of a smile flittered across Emmaline's face.

"Well then... would you prefer coffee with your laudanum... or tea? Peach always has a pot stewing." _Surprise! The woman's human!_

"Tea please... with milk and sugar if there is any."

"My niece is attending to the laundry. I believe she's doing shirts and trousers at present, so you'll have something else to wear in a few hours. In the meantime, let's try to preserve some semblance of dignity, shall we?"

Kim blushed. "Yes, m'am... I'm real sorry about that..."

Emmaline got up and returned a few minutes later with a large cup of steaming oolong. "There's not enough laudanum in there to knock you out, but you may feel drowsy. We should probably start your chart now before that happens."

Kim answered all of her questions politely and succinctly, lying only where necessary to preserve his cover. Emmaline was inclined to linger and learn more about this exotic young man so far from home (Freddy had given her a short but as yet unconfirmed synopsis of his suspicions)... but there was much work yet to do...

 **Inside the house** lunch preparations were completed and all the informally-clad ambulatory inmates summoned to the table (meaning everyone but Jess and Jonesy)—Andy in nightshirt, Slim in longjohns and Kim in his bunny suit (with arms reinserted in the sleeves). It was fairly evident from Andy's doleful mien, when only a platter of biscuits and bowls of soup were placed before them by Peach, that he'd been hoping for something more substantial on the order of fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. Slim didn't care because he couldn't smell or taste anything anyway. Kim didn't care because he was hungry enough to chew the butt out of a rag doll. Bleats of distress emanated from Sickroom Number Two. When Andy complained to Emmaline while scowling at Peach, Peach scowled back with both hands on hips while dispensing a rapid and vitriolic commentary on what he could do in his soupbowl, causing Kim to choke on his biscuit.

"What'd she say?" Andy inquired.

Emmaline shrugged, replying, "Peach says you have two menu choices: take it or leave it."

For the next few minutes the only sounds to be heard were slurping, soupspoons clinking on china, Peach's mumbled imprecations regarding the conjoined ancestry of foreign devils (white people) and dogs... and renewed cries from Sickroom Number Two. Something about being abandoned and left to starve to death. (Emmaline had personally taken a tray to Jonesy earlier.)

When Emmaline later sent Peach in with his grub, Jess refused to be spoon-fed even though he couldn't sit up straight enough to manage a tray on his lap and couldn't hold a spoon with his bandaged right paw. An altercation ensued and somehow Jess ended up with noodles all over the bed and chicken soup dripping from the overturned bowl sitting like a yarmulke on top of his head. (An accident, Peach claimed.)

 **With lunch concluded,** Emmaline directed Andy to find something to read at the kitchen table and stay there until told otherwise. Slim was positioned across from him with a towel over his head, inhaling vapor from a bowl of boiling water infused with camphorated oil. She decided Jonesy would benefit from sitting up for a while, so he was evicted from his deathbed and instructed to take up his rocker by the fireplace and read or darn socks—whatever... just stay out from underfoot.

Kim elected to return to his post on the porch, where the rocker had been dragged to the other end out of the traffic corridor. Easing himself back into it after taking a surreptitious whiz into a nearby rose bush when no one was looking, he rolled himself a good-sized après-lunch spliff and prepared to watch the afternoon unfold. He'd been hoping for another opportunity to converse with Sally but she remained out of sight in the side yard, wrangling laundry with dogged perseverance. Having already cycled several loads of underwear and outerwear, she was starting on towels and bedlinens.

After running out of line and pegs and festooning every available bush with various items of personal attire, Sally appropriated some fairly clean catch ropes from the barn (reasoning that a pinch of horse hair and a dash of cow manure never hurt anyone) and had lines zigzagging everywhere she could find to attach them. From a distance, the area encompassed by the house, the barn and the chicken coop looked like a Bedouin encampment (or, for those of you unable to visualize such, imagine if you will a giant inebriated spider running amuck in a barnyard). Happily, it being a warm and breezy day, everything was drying quickly.

From time to time Sally would stagger up onto the porch with an armload of clean laundry to presort on the fainting couch. Kim continued to languish unhappily in his pink union suit as none of the incoming batches had thus far produced his clothes and Sally couldn't spare a moment to chat. Kim didn't know it yet but the Sherman Ranch and Relay Station was about to turn into a three-ring circus and he had a front row seat.

 _CHAPTER TWELVE—PART TWO_

 **REMODELS AND REASSIGNMENTS**

" _ **The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster."**_ _(Rosabeth Moss Cantor)_

 **Emmaline was another** one of those people who could juggle several different balls of thought and not drop a one. During the early morning briefing with her nephew—where she'd been informed of the nature of the patients' illnesses/injuries and obtained a general idea of the layout and limitations of the Sherman establishment—Emmaline's brain had gone into overdrive. For instance, who would be sleeping where. There were only two bedrooms and she and Peach needed one of them, which meant turfing Andy and Jonesy out of theirs. The second bedroom had—besides Slim and Jess' single beds—a bunk bed and a cot on the far side of a partition, which at first she assumed would take care of that problem. Upon reflection she realized two separate environments were needed—one for the respiratorily-afflicted and another for the orthopedic cases. She had an idea for that.

Accommodations for private personal hygiene were nonexistent—obviously the Saturday night hipbath in the parlor wasn't going to work for five males and two females. The outdoor cold-water showers would do only as long as the weather continued warm—which could end any day now. But upon hearing of the partly-constructed bunk house she'd had an idea for that, too.

Emmaline was nothing if not resourceful. By the time the surrey was packed and ready to roll out, she'd made out several lists of must-haves and left it to Freddy to see that the items were acquired and delivered that afternoon. Young Doc promised he'd attend to it and would round up some warm bodies to handle necessary ranch operations while his aunt and her assistant covered the nursing and domestic issues.

 **In the meantime...** Jess Harper was feeling sorry for himself. No one was bothering to explain what was going on. For someone who'd dwelt in unstable environments most of his life, he'd gotten used to the relatively quiet and ordered existence on the ranch and disliked changes in it... especially changes enacted by other people over whom he had no control. His head hurt and his leg ached abominably. He wondered what this thing on his leg was that looked like chalk and felt like lead. His back was stiff from having lain flat on it for an entire day. Plus he was trapped in a damp bed, sticky with glutinous chicken noodle soup. He idly picked a congealed noodle off his chest and munched on it. Not bad. He ate another one and another one.

Jess was plumb et up with the sorries and the worries—sorry for not having warned Mose to hold the horses until given a clear signal to move out, sorry for having aggravated Slim (not realizing how ill he was), sorry for acting the fool earlier with the tall white lady and later with the small Chinese lady. He worried about who would be taking care of the stage today... or looking after the stock. He worried about catching whatever had got hold of Slim. If he'd known about Andy's measles he probably would've also worried about catching them as he didn't know if he'd ever had measles before.

He wondered who belonged to the unidentified voice he'd heard earlier (as yet having no knowledge of Kim's presence). And why hadn't Slim and Andy and Jonesy been in to see him?

Even more perturbing was the presence of the doctor's intimidating sister, whose voice he recognized though he'd not seen her. Jess had first met the woman about two weeks after his arrival—the day she'd come out to the ranch to attend two of Slim's brood mares. Dumbfounded at the very idea of a female blacksmith, Jess had been openly dismissive until Slim explained the difference between a 'blacksmith' as Jess understood it and a 'farrier' who specialized in corrective shoeing. On top of that, this Sally was an artisan metalworker... something else Jess didn't exactly get until Slim walked him over to the family graveyard enclosed by an elegant ornamental iron fence with a trellised arch at its entrance... designed and constructed by S. Lowenstein.

Needless to say, S. Lowenstein and Jess Harper got off on the wrong foot that day and had spoken only a few times since then.

Logic told Jess that if he had to break a leg then this was the best possible place for it to have happened... not lying out in the desert close to death until some passerby chanced on him days later, as had happened to him in the past. But the greater portion of his attention was raging against fate. Hadn't he already endured enough sorrow and suffering in his twenty-six years to last an entire lifetime? More than anything else in this world, Jess feared incapacitation and dependency. How could he live if he lost his leg? What would become of him?

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _Jess didn't know this, of course, but he was bein' punished for his earlier misbehavior by bein' left to wallow in his own mess in solitary for a spell. Emmaline had kept Slim and Andy away from him on purpose by suggestin' they not carry their germs in there. And had Jess known of the indignities to which he'd shortly be subjected and just how long he was gonna be_ hors de combat _, he might have been tempted to smother himself with his own wet pillow. Except that the old Chinese woman had taken it away.)_

 **Later...** With all her patients fed and settled (with the exception of Jess), Emmaline turned her attention to rearranging furniture (because that's what we women do, mentally anyway, when we walk into someone else's home). First of all, Mister Sherman and Mister Harper had to be separated—period. Space had to be opened up for the additional bedframes being brought in. And preparations had to be made for the arrival of the four o'clock stage.

Emmaline had just paused in her return trip from the necessary to inquire how Kim was doing when their attention was diverted by the arrival in the yard of a gaily red- and yellow-enameled and gaudily ornamented gingerbread cottage on wheels, complete with bent stove pipe poking out of the arched roof and drawn by a pair of ancient, luxuriantly-feathered piebald gypsy vanner ponies. Kim knew what it was but had never expected to see one in this part of the world.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's explanation of the Koski Brothers...**_ _Feetrikki [Feets], Oscari [Oxtoe] and Roopertii [Roop] Kalliokoski were retired cowboys, originally sailors hailing from Finland, who had jumped ship in Boston and made their way west, eventually finding permanent employment on Old Doc Whatleigh's country estate. They now lived in a grace-and-favor bungalow [the former farmhouse] on the original one hundred sixty acres of prime riverfront bottomland just north of Laramie proper. [Joint owners Young Doc and his aunt continually turned down offers from real estate agents on the advice of their attorney, Lindsay McNutt, who foresaw that eventually that property would be worth a mint.] The former bunk house served as a crash pad for other elderly, itinerant cowpunchers with no fixed abode and there were always half a dozen or so hanging around [composition subject to change] at any given time._

 _Feets and Oxtoe were identical twins who couldn't be told apart unless barefoot, Oxtoe having suffered frostbite at one time and possessing only two toes on one foot. Roop was their baby brother. All three were in their seventies and in rude good health, favoring old-style woolie chaps and ten-gallon hats. Feets and Oxtoe preferred walrus mustaches while Roop went in for the horseshoe look. They all chewed tobacco and had a grand total of thirteen teeth in the aggregate._

 _The Koskis no longer fooled with cattle of their own but still rode regularly and were wizards with any sort of horseflesh you'd care to name. The Whatleigh homestead now served as a retirement home for beloved horses, mules and burros whose former owners couldn't bear to put them down just because they were past usefulness. Young Doc and Emmaline underwrote maintenance and feed costs outside of the ongoing contributions made by nostalgic pre-owners._

 _The Koski brothers were available for odd jobs and on-call substitute wrangling but they only operated as a trio—if you hired one you got all three—and they were perfectly willing to work for barter as well as money. Their many unsung talents included carpentry, ironworking and crocheting._

 _Feets, Oxtoe and Roop were small men—barely over five feet tall. Their blue eyes were faded to gray now and their fair hair had turned white before mostly turning loose, except for those magnificent mustaches. Their leathered faces resembled dried crabapple dolls. They still spoke Finnish among themselves but were conversant in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Sámi and Rom as there were still plenty of their pre-Civil War Scandinavian immigrant peers around._

 _The Koskis were sentimental old geezers, from time to time given to reenactments of the great overland cattle drives of their youth. To that end they had refurbished a circa-1839 chuckwagon with interior cooking, dining and lounging facilities and triple bunks, thus creating one of the Far West's first recreational camping vehicles. They didn't have any cattle and they never wandered more than a day or so's drive from home, but they had great good fun pretending to be carefree young cowpunchers again._

 _Their custom-conversion unit served them well until they had an opportunity to bid on a genuine Romany gypsy_ vardo _whose previous owner had run afoul of a cardsharp who took exception to her augury that he'd be cashing in his chips sooner rather than later. He shot the fortuneteller and the sheriff shot him, thereby accelerating the prediction. The wagon and team were auctioned off to cover burial expenses for both._

 _The hard-walled, solid-roofed vardo was superior to the canvas-topped camper because it was weathertight and already came with nifty built-ins. [The camperwagon was subsequently sold to a prospective sheepman who enjoyed it only two weeks before being shepherded, along with his flock, to greener pastures in the sky by an anonymous cattleman.]_

 _The Koski brothers had been requisitioned to mind the Sherman livestock, including chickens and Andy's menagerie, round up range cattle and provide stageline operations support. And, of course, the ubiquitous '_ other duties as assigned' _.)_

 **Crowded on the driver's bench** were three gnarled gnomes. The conveyance creaked to a halt in front of the porch and the three leprechauns leaped off the seat, chattering in some language unknown to Kim and lining up in formation to face Emmaline, their hats clutched to their scrawny chests and sunbeams glinting off their polished domes.

"Excellent. The cavalry have arrived," Emmaline stated before introducing the Kalliokoski brothers: Feets, Oxtoe and Roop—collectively known as the 'Koskis'.

Kim received a brief introduction and committed the names to memory then looked on with amusement at the dismay on the faces of the three little men as _Sergeant Major Emma_ (a variation on _Nurse Emma_ ) split them into details. When they objected to being separated, Emmaline gave them what for and they meekly knuckled under, sensing that insubordination was useless in the face of a superior power.

At Emmaline's direction two of the brothers (Oxtoe and Roop) led the team and wagon around to the side of the corral and parked it in the shade of a cottonwood tree, where it would serve as the Koskis' _pied-à-terre_ for the foreseeable future. The vanners were unhitched, unharnessed and turned into the pasture along with the other horses. The men returned to let down the folding steps at the rear of the _vardo_ before unrolling and erecting a striped awning held up by poles and guy ropes. They then unloaded what appeared to be rolls of canvas and carried these around to the back of the house.

Feets went indoors after thoroughly wiping his feet at the door and inspecting his bootsoles. He came back out a few minutes later, cautiously toting a slop jar with Emmaline right behind promising to dropkick his heinie all the way back to the Old Country if he even _thought_ about dumping the contents anywhere but in the outhouse. (He believed her, too.) Oxtoe then helped him remove furniture (including the vile horsehair sofa) from the far back wall of the parlor and carry it out to the barn, after which they transferred an alarmed Jess over to Slim's bed, then brought Jess' mattress outside and flung it over the porch rail to dry out after Peach gave it a good scrubbing and drenching. With that accomplished they trooped around the side of the house to join their brother in assembling Emmaline's vision.

The succeeding hour brought a lull in the activity, aside from the sawing, hammering and pounding noises (and occasional cursing) coming from somewhere behind the house... evidently involving that curious unfinished structure Kim had noted on his trips out back. He could have got up and had a look for himself but he'd finally found a comfortable position and was unwilling to leave it. (Peach had brought him a small keg and a pillow so he could prop his feet up.)

As Kim dozed off the effects of a full belly and a joint, he was unaware of the intervals when Sally would come onto the porch with an armload of dry laundry and pause to study him... unsure of what she was feeling about someone she'd only just met that morning, or why. But there was all that damned laundry to be folded and put away...


	13. Chapter 13

_CHAPTER THIRTEEN—PART ONE_

 **SIEGE PREPAREDNESS**

" _ **Organize yourselves... prepare every needful thing..."**_ _(Book of Mormon)_

 **Mid-afternoon...** Another vehicle advanced into the yard, borrowed from the Schell's Brewery distributor who owed Emmaline favors—being pulled along effortlessly by a pair of burly chestnut Belgians with flaxen manes and tales, with Luca Giancomo (aka Lucky) at the reins and Lindsay McNutt (aka Lychee) beside him on the seat holding a covered bird cage on his lap. Lucky and Lychee had got their assignments that morning from their respective mothers (Emmaline and Peach) and in an amazingly few hours—with the assistance of Pearl Wing Whatleigh and a gaggle of Wing half-sisters—had managed to round up almost everything on Emmaline's and Young Doc's lists.

A partial inventory of these provisions reveals a quarter-lifetime supply of rice in burlap bags; four smoked hams; four crates of live hens; baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables; boxes of canned goods; cotton sacks of flour and other staple goods; gallon jars of vinegar and other astringents and disinfectants; an entire case of Gayetty's toilet tissue; and boxes containing jars and tins of traditional nostrums, tinctures and restoratives including a substantial supply of Kentucky's and Tennessee's finest medicinal alcohol and enough castor oil to unclog every constipated citizen in the territory.

Also a hope chest's worth of thick towels, clean white bedlinens and extra blankets and quilts; a dozen duckdown bedpillows; ten pairs of blue cotton flannel men's pajamas in assorted sizes (the very latest in thing in sleepwear fashion—direct from London, Paris and Bombay); three rolled up mattress ticks and three specialty bedframes; three extra thundermugs and a bedpan; a commode chair; a wheelchair; a pair of store-bought crutches; and an industrial-size washboiler. (No partridges in pear trees although Peach had requested her caged finches be brought as there was no one left at home to feed them.)

 _(_ _ **Gracie's notes...**_ _Young Doc and Emmaline came up with the idea of an articulated three-segmented adjustable bed long before a patent for such was registered in 1874 and had the Koskis build four of them for the 'hospital' wing attached to the clinic. They looked like a cross between an iron bedstead and a steamer deck lounge chair, adjustable at both ends.)_

 _(_ _ **Gracie's discourse on Lychee and Lucky...**_ _Lindsay "Lychee" McNutt, son of Peach, acquired his nickname at University of Edinburgh which he attended along with Wilfred Whatleigh. Freddy majored in medicine and co-eds while Lychee turned to law, international diplomacy, finance and underclassmen. Lychee currently served as Wing Chen Li's attorney of record and most honorably efficient_ compradore _, leaving Mister Wing to enjoy at leisure the attentions of his one official wife, two additional unofficial wives, several concubines and increasing multitude of offspring._

 _Lychee spoke uninflected, unaccented grammatically-correct American English when he chose to—it was, after all, his first language [Cantonese being the second]. But he could negotiate like a_ shadchan _, haggle like a Moroccan camel merchant and say 'your momma wears cavalry boots' in five additional tongues. He also read Greek and Latin._

 _Lychee's coloring and facial features were unmistakably Asian in origin although he was quite tall and his hair had an interesting reddish tinge to it. Lychee and Lucky Giancomo [see below] still lived at home with their respective mothers and shared third floor accommodations. Although quite fond of each other their relationship was more a semi-committed one, meaning they both had roving eyes but in a restrictive society such as prevailed in Laramie, opportunities to reach out and touch someone in a meaningful manner were few and far between._

 _Lychee was in charge of procurement [supplies and matériel for the ranch, not the bordello] and whatever else his mother told him to do. Lychee was not planning on staying over._

 _Luca "Lucky" Giancomo, Emmaline's son, was an uncommonly handsome lad with abundant blue-black curls and chocolate-brown eyes [they ran in the family] who demonstrated artistic virtuosity at an early age and was educated accordingly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Lucky claimed a market niche in reclining nudes for saloon bar backs and generated a tidy income with orders from four territories coming in almost faster than he could paint them._

 _At the Prairie Rose Lucky had an endless supply of willing [off-duty] models with whom he generously shared commissions. He was always to be found there on Sundays when the establishment was closed for maintenance. He could certainly have had his pick of any of the fillies in that stable—none of the bonnie lassies therein would have been averse to his fondling the merchandise. Alas, his fancies lay elsewhere. His mother wasn't too put out about this, having been short-changed in the maternal instincts department and frankly having had her fill of children underfoot._

 _Lucky was not the sharpest ax in the woodshed but he was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. [Whatta guy!] He was also as large as his younger cousin Freddy. When not painting, his day job was gofer and heavy-lifter at the Rose, including lifting troublemakers out the door._

 _Lucky would not be staying at the ranch as he had been temporarily elevated to the position of assistant brothel manager in his mother's absence. However, his brawn was required for driving the wagon, delivering supplies needing heavy lifting, and for restraint of unruly patients as necessary.)_

 **Lychee climbed down first,** bounding up the porch step with the birdcage. He glanced to his right and halted in mid-bound, eyes widening and nostrils flaring... pink being his favorite color. He put the cage down and went over to make his acquaintance. He and Kim had barely got past the introductory formalities when Peach stuck her head out the door, screeching at Lychee to bring in that fornicating birdcage and get busy unloading that fornicating wagon as she didn't have all fornicating day. It had taken her son about two seconds to recognize a racial kinship with the pretty boy on the porch, though not a similar orientation... and he wisely refrained from commenting on either one.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Young Doc had not had enough time earlier that morning to convey his forebodings concerning the presence of a possible assassin in their midst, but that wouldn't have fazed Lychee... he liked 'em young and delectably dangerous and was in fact harboring a major secret crush on a certain semi-reformed gunfighter who fortunately remained totally clueless. Had Lychee sensed that Kim might be a fellow team player, he would've been on him like white on rice. Although Lychee had a distaste for violence in any form, he prudently kept brass knuckles in his pocket and a razor in his boot for self-defense... and knew how to use them.)_

 **Lucky staggered up** with a double armload of boxes and stopped dead in his tracks before stuttering out an introduction. His interest wasn't so much prurient—although this one had _possibilities_ —as artistic. Portraiture was his first great love, artwise, and he was always on the lookout for exotic physiognomies. He'd never seen a face quite like Kim's before and needed a few seconds to commit it to his eidetic memory.

Kim wondered where they were going to find room to put all that stuff—the house didn't seem all that big and what he'd seen of it so far, the parlor and kitchen, were already cluttered. Maybe there was a hidden maze of rooms elsewhere? He picked up _W &P_ and tried to whip up some enthusiasm for the antics of Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and Prince Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov but kept drowsing off (probably on account of Emmaline's having augmented his chicken noodle soup with a little extra dab of laudanum).

It was getting on toward late afternoon. Kim perked up and took interest in the last items being wrestled off the beer wagon: three iron-banded flat-bottomed octagonal wooden tubs which looked very much like _ofuros_ —Japanese soaking tubs. He supposed it was too much to hope that that's what they really were. One was the size of an industrial pickle-curing vat, cut down to four feet in height and wide enough in diameter to accommodate two adults. Lucky and Lychee rolled these around to the side of the house where hammering had ceased.

Feets and Oxtoe Koski interrupted their work to help Roop harness the relay horses in anticipation of the stagecoach's arrival (it made only one run on Sundays) and were standing by when it rumbled up. As the Koskis and Mose were contempories and old friends, they took a little longer than necessary visiting while swapping out teams. Emmaline finally had to come out and tell them to quit chewing the fat and let Mose get on with his business. She also explained to Mose that due to unforeseen circumstances he and his passengers wouldn't be getting their coffee and pie that day or any other day in the foreseeable future.

Just as the stage was preparing to pull out, an almighty ruckus broke out inside the house that was clearly audible to everyone on the premises including the stage passengers and two aboriginal rustlers attempting to extract Deecy from her pasture behind the barn. Both stagecoach and thieves decamped in haste, believing Armageddon was upon them (or however Indians perceived doomsday). What everyone had heard was _"OH HELL NOOOOOOOO!"_

 _CHAPTER THIRTEEN—PART TWO_

 **A CRISIS IN THE CASUALTY WARD**

" _ **There are three kinds of men. The one that learns from reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."**_ _(Will Rogers)_

 **A few minutes earlier...** The Sherman domicile had been transformed in a field hospital with hardly room to swing a cat, even a very small one (or a kitten for that matter). Andy and Jonesy's room was now designated the nurses' quarters. Slim and Jess' room was being converted to a contagion unit for Slim and Andy—not in the sense of isolating their respective bugs (it was already too late for that) but because they both had the fever and required different treatment. The far wall of the parlor had been transformed into an 'orthopedic unit', sectioned off from the rest of the room with privacy curtains made from bedsheets. Safety-pinned to harness O-rings sliding on thick wood dowels suspended from the ceiling by screw hooks, they could be easily pulled aside or drawn together. (The three intended patients would not, however, be shielded from one another.)

One of the segmented bedframes had been positioned in the 'contagion unit' for Slim, so he could sleep with his head and chest elevated. The other two had been installed side by side in the ortho ward, neatly made up with clean sheets, blankets and pillows—ready for their intended occupants, Jess and Kim. Slim's regular bedstead was destined for the northeast corner for Jonesy. But before Mister Harper could be moved out of it to his nice clean new bed, he was in need of a thorough washing-up. Here's where Emmaline made a tactical error.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Actually, she'd made two, but the other wouldn't come to light until later: Young Doc had neglected to advise her of Jess' attitude toward unknown halfbreeds. Otherwise he would have cautioned against placing Jess and Kim in such close proximity before being properly introduced.)_

 **Now Emmaline had been** as busy as a cat trying to cover up feces on an Eyetalian marble floor. Instead of detailing a team of men—Lychee/Lucky or Feets/Oxtoe—to take care of getting Jess cleaned up, she'd told Peach to do it. Peach had balked on the grounds that that wasn't in her job description. Emmaline had reminded her of the 'other duties as assigned' clause as she'd swept out the door to break up the old boys' gossipfest out by the stagecoach and check on the progress of the construction project. Peach had sullenly shuffled off with a load of towels and washcloths, returning a few moments later to fill a large enameled tin basin with hot water into which she dropped a chunk of carbolic soap.

Jess and Peach, newly sworn enemies over the soup affair, had given each other the stinkeye on her first pass into the room. When she came in the second time with that basin and hove to the side of the bed, his suspicions were confirmed. In his deepest, most threatening voice, he'd thundered, _"GET OUT!"_ (You would think Jess would have already learned a lesson about the probable outcome of tangling with Peach but... no...)

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Peach's original occupation having been more in the area of social services, her command of the English language was limited to simple constructs such as 'yes', 'no', 'you want jig-jig?', and 'two dollah' although she understood spoken English perfectly well. She somehow managed to convey her wants and needs via hand gestures and one- to two-syllable utterances.)_

 **She fixed her beady obsidian eyes** on his steely blue ones. "You stink. I wash."

"You ain't washin nothin a mine!" Jess growled like a Doberman on steroids.

"You shuddup. You no fight. I wash," Peach insisted, posturing like a ninja about to pounce.

" _GET AWAY FROM ME!"_ Jess bared his teeth menacingly in his best vampire imitation.

" _I WASH!"_ Peach snarled.

She took an equally menacing step forward and that's when the hills came alive with a lot more than the sound of music. Choice Texan epithets and strident Cantonese caterwauling shook the foundations, along with the crump of a heavy object hitting the floor.

Emmaline rushed back into the house with Feets and Oxtoe bobbing like corks in her wake. Lychee and Lucky, already in the parlor, collided at the door to the bedroom.

At the kitchen table Andy's mouth fell open and he paused in mid-scratch. Slim lifted a corner of the towel aside to see if there was an Indian attack in progress, while in the cage hung on the wall above alarmed finches shrieked and showered birdseed and tiny yellow and black feathers onto their heads.

Jonesy, who'd been snoozing with a half-darned sock in his lap, jerked awake and jabbed himself in the thumb with the needle.

Out on the front porch, Kim lost his place in _W &P_ (which was too bad as he was just beginning to sort out the Rostov kids—Natalia Ilyinichna, Nikolai Ilyich, Vera Ilyinichna and Pyotr Ilyich—and would have to start that chapter over).

Behind the _vardo_ out by the cottonwood tree, Roop, attending to some business of his own, lost both his grip and his aim and tinkled his own boots.

In the side yard, surrounded by flapping and squawking chickens, Sally fumbled a wet bedsheet and dropped it in a cluster of fresh droppings.

The yowling sounded like a cat being tortured... either that or some poor soul being racked in a dungeon. Even more alarming, the cacophony ceased abruptly after a few minutes.

 **No one could figure out** quite how he'd managed it, but Jess had bucked himself clean out of his replacement nest and was lying face down on the floor next to the bed, with the upturned basin over his head. (It was an accident, Peach swore.)

It took the combined efforts of Lychee, Lucky, Feets and Oxtoe to lift Jess up and flip him back onto the bed. It was like trying to right a spitting mad upside-down sea turtle that was fighting back with its only two working appendages. While Peach went to get another basin of water, Emmaline got a bottle of chloroform and a folded washrag.

Well, to make a long story short (or shortER), once Jess was gorked, Peach and Emmaline got to work with the carbolic soap and plenty of hot water. When they were done, the boys carried Jess into the parlor where he was installed in his new bed, squeaky clean and fresh as a daisy from head to toe although his teeth could have used some attention. His sable hair had been shampooed and restored to its natural wavy lustre. His face was as smooth as a baby's butt thanks to Peach's dab hand with a straight razor (after an advisory from Emmaline concerning further 'accidents'). He was generously talcum-powdered under those new-fangled loose-fitting pajamas and the casted leg had been elevated slightly to relieve torsion on the hip joint. (Peach had picked out the outside seam of the right leg of the bottoms so that they could be slipped over the cast and fastened with ties.) Even his fingernails and toenails had been meticulously scrubbed and trimmed. Best of all (from _Nurse Emma's_ point of view), in his new location he could be continuously monitored and any sign of bad behavior nipped in the bud.

Emmaline had noticed with annoyance the gunbelt hanging off the headboard of Jess' bed and had immediately removed it. She was about to park it next to Slim's gunbelt on the rack by the front door when Jonesy spoke up.

"Best let the boy keep that where he can reach it."

"Surely you're not serious?"

"Oh... I'm dead serious. We've tried to get him to leave it on the rack when he's in the house but then he's nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs and can't sleep."

"That's just plain ridiculous. He's an invalid... there's no need for him to have a weapon in a sickroom. I won't have it."

"Then you won't have any peace, either. Please, Emmaline... humor me. Try to think of it as a security blanket for a two-year-old... 'cause that's exactly how he's going to act if you don't let him keep it nearby. Let the boy have his woobie... I'm begging you."

"Oh all right... but..." Emmaline removed the pistol from its holster and deftly extracted the bullets, checking the chamber and spinning the cylinder to make sure she'd got them all, muttering 'Trigger-happy fool!' before carrying the belt to the back of the room.

 **Jess Harper's face** in repose, as Emmaline admired her and Peach's handiwork, was as angelic as that of any Renaissance cherub. She caught herself, not for the first time, thinking what a crime against nature that such a perfectly-proportioned work of art carried so many disfiguring scars, both physical and psychological. Still, he was a healthy, handsome young man who she hoped would live to be a healthy, handsome old man with two serviceable legs. The odds of that happening weren't favorable, considering what she knew of him... but as far as the injured leg itself was concerned she was optimistically inclined toward full recovery as there was no evidence of sepsis so far. The problem would be in convincing him to accept immobility during the time it would take to heal. An even bigger challenge would be keeping depression at bay.


	14. Chapter 14

_CHAPTER FOURTEEN—PART ONE_

 **IN THE BATHHOUSE OF THE OCTOBER MOON**

" _ **Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine"**_ _(St. Thomas Aquinas)_

 **Late afternoon...** In the contagion unit, Slim was now settled under an improvised respiratory therapy tent—a bedsheet over a wooden frame, with bowls of hot water infused with oils of peppermint and wintergreen on the floor sending up congestion-relieving vapors. A calamine-coated Andy dozed on the cot behind the partition until the mattress for Jess' regular bed had dried enough to be brought inside. Emmaline had talked Slim into giving the pajamas a try and he indicated, even though he couldn't speak, that they were comfortable and he was pleased. Andy followed suit, once he saw that not only his big brother but his idol was willing to wear them. (Jess, of course, wasn't yet aware that he was.)

Jonesy got a shave and a liniment backrub from Peach. It took some doing to get him into a new style of sleepwear but once there he admitted they were an improvement on the hot and itchy union suit. He was sleeping peacefully in the bed in the opposite corner from Jess. Only one more patient to tidy up.

Peach was in the kitchen with supper under way (beef broth with barley and dry toast). Roop had milked the cow (after hobbling her back legs—no dope he!), having got an early start on chores. Feets and Oxtoe had finished evening feeds and were back to doing whatever they'd been doing earlier behind the house. Under the cottonwood, a folding wooden campaign table and three chairs of the same ilk had been positioned under the striped awning. Off to the side, Roop was cooking something at a waist-high, four-legged rectangular box that looked like a steamer trunk fabricated of sheet metal. Every time Roop opened the lid and poked at whatever was on the grid, flames leaped up and the tantalizing fragrance of barbecuing pork rolled in the direction of Kim's salivary glands.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's commentary on hospital food...**_ _Kim somehow doubted he and his wardmates would be gettin' any of_ that _for dinner no matter how pitifully they begged, and he was right. They was lucky Jell-O hadn't been invented yet. I mean, think about it... have you_ ever _got barbecue on your tray in the hospital? What do dieticians have against barbecue anyway? And wasn't the Koski brothers' portable grill a clever idea, considerin' fifty-five gallon oil drums hadn't been invented yet either!)_

 **With the afternoon sun bearing** directly on the porch, Kim had once again squirmed out of the top of the union suit and retied the arms at his waist. He'd just stood up to stretch his legs and was facing away from the door when Lychee and Lucky sauntered out, preparing to head back to town with fresh requisition orders to be delivered the next day. Both of them stopped in their tracks at the sight of the tattoo—a prime example of IndoAsian or Polynesian representational art, Luca observed with delight. He was about to open his mouth but Lychee gave the tiniest of nods and put a finger to his lips, signaling to keep quiet about it. They said their goodbyes, climbed on the beer wagon and decamped.

 **Emmaline was satisfied** that the situation was under control and that her nephew would find no fault with their efforts when he finally arrived. She was a little concerned that he hadn't shown up yet. She stepped out on the porch and turned her attention to Kim, who wasn't quite as scared of her as he'd been that morning although he hastily squirmed back into the top portion of his bunny suit.

"How are we doing?"

"We might survive if we can stay out from under horses," he quipped with a barely discernible grin.

"It's nice to see _someone_ with a sense of humor around here. If you could have anything you wanted right now, what would it be?"

"Morphine with a tequila chaser?" It was Emmaline's turn to suppress amusement. She had a right little comedian on her hands.

"Does it really hurt that bad?" (Knowing it did.)

"Yes, m'am. It surely does. But only when I breathe."

"Aside from morphine—which you're not going to get by the way as we only serve that at amputations—what else would you like?"

"Seriously? A hot bath!"

"I rather thought so. I'll be right back." And she was, with a bottle of homemade blackberry wine, a bundle of blue cloth and a pair of moccasins. "I have something to show you that I think you're going to like."

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Such utilities infrastructures as electricity, gas and piped water were as yet only a gleam in a Laramie City's municipal planner's eye but they were right around the corner and Emmaline was prepared for their eventuality. On her forays into major Eastern metropolitan centers and few sojourns abroad, she'd been greatly admiring of indoor plumbing and its attendant facilities, and by the fact that many foreign cultures—notably non-European—regarded daily full-immersion bathing as a necessity... as opposed to the weekly, monthly or semi-annual routines conducted by most rural Americans.)_

 **She held out a hand.** "Come along. Be careful going down the steps. Hold onto my arm."

"I think I can manage..."

"Just do as you're told. If you trip and fall down and break something else, I'll have to shoot you. I only have one bullet in my derringer and I'm saving it for Mister Harper."

"Yes, m'am."

They moved slowly across the porch, down the steps and around the corner of the house on duckboards leading to a large pitched-roofed rectangular assemblage of waxed canvas lashed to the wooden framework of the intended bunk house. Kim had seen it on an earlier trip to the necessary some hours earlier but hadn't wished to disturb the construction workers at their labors.

"What's this?"

"You'll see. Let's go inside." Up a ramp and through a flap door, Kim was astonished to find a Japanese-style community bathhouse. The tent had been partitioned by overlapping canvas curtains from behind which heat radiated and wisps of steam escaped. One of the smaller half-barrels was the wash station, with a bench nearby holding an assortment of towels, loofahs and soaps. The other small barrel was the rinsing station, with a pail of cold water and a dipper. The largest barrel—the soaking tub—was full of steaming hot water infused with Epsom salts.

Kim spoke slowly and sincerely. "Miss Emma... I think I've died and gone to paradise... but I'm afraid if I get down in there I won't be able to get back up."

"No problem... you'll have spotters... Feets! Oxtoe!"

There was a rustle at the partition and the two apple-cheeked elders appeared in a halo of steam with towels wrapped around their middles. (Customary modesty didn't apply within the confines of a bathhouse.)

"Yah, miss?" Oxtoe queried.

"Here's your first customer. He has broken ribs so handle with care, please."

"Yah, miss," Feets echoed.

"Sauna?" questioned Oxtoe. (If Slim had seen this first, he would have thought _onikare_ —Lakota for sweat lodge.)

"Thirty minutes tops," Emmaline stated firmly.

Kim spoke up, "Only thirty...?"

"Maybe a little longer in a few days but not today."

"Why not...?"

"Because I said so. I know what those old farts do in there. They'll swill akvavit until they're knee-walking commode-hugging drunk. But they'll be fine in the morning... you, on the other hand, would be dead or wishing you were."

This sounded promising, Kim thought. "Where do they get that stuff here? All I've seen is rye whiskey and bourbon."

"Doctor Whatleigh orders it special for them. Look, if you start drinking with them you'll end up vomiting. And if you think your ribs are hurting now..."

"Okay... I get it. Thirty minutes. No akvavit. What's for dinner?"

"Beef broth with barley and biscuits."

"Yum. My favorite."

"Stop acting like a child. Here..."

Kim had assumed the wine was for the Koskis, but she uncorked the bottle and set it on the bench then produced a tin cup from a pocket. "An apéritif for Sky Lizard to enjoy with his bath. I find it to be an excellent restorative, more so than hard spirits." Said with a straight face.

"Madame is too kind," Kim responded, wondering why she was giving him such an odd look.

Emmaline unfolded the bundle, shaking out the pajamas. "These are all the rage back in England. They're called pajamas and they come from India. They were advertised in the _Laramie Gazette_ as being suitable for both sexes. I have a pair myself and can vouch for their comfort. This is where I leave you... until suppertime anyway. Mind the splinters... they didn't have time to sand anything."

After she'd gone Kim shucked his clothes and joined the brothers in the sauna. The heat source was a _kiuas_ —a little iron firebox on stubby legs with carry handles and a sectioned pipe venting to the outside. On top was a removable shallow iron bowl filled with fist-sized polished river stones over which cold water was dipped from buckets on the floor to produce steam.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's explanation...**_ _This was the Koski's portable travel sauna, cunningly designed to avoid setting the tent on fire. At home they had a proper cedar-lined cabin with benches wide enough and long enough to lie down on and a water intake line running from the wellhouse as they preferred steam to the more traditional smoke.)_

 **When his time was up,** Kim soaped up, rinsed off and descended into the soaking tub. Utter bliss! Roop came in to join his brothers. The four of them carried on their conversation through the canvas partition. Kim asked many questions about the Koskis' homeland, where he'd never been. They were very much interested in his, which they'd visited a few times back in their sailor days but hadn't strayed outside the ports. They were especially fascinated with his tattoo and wanted to know when and where he got it and what it meant.

Kim sipped his wine and soaked in that tub until his fingertips pruned and he felt boneless as a ferret. He'd just toweled off and dressed in the blue pajamas when Emmaline the party-pooper came out to break it up and he allowed his slightly tipsy self to be escorted back along the duckboards.

 _CHAPTER FOURTEEN—PART TWO_

 **THE CONSEQUENCES OF INSUFFICIENT DATA**

" _ **I feel like a mushroom... people keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit."**_ _(Unattributed)_

 **Earlier...** Jess was slowly rousing from his chloroform-suspended state between a dream wherein an elephant sitting on his leg was hosing chicken noodle soup from its trunk into his face and the reality of that same leg encased in a ton of white marble with five toes at the end of it, beyond them a white marble wall. As his senses synchronized he realized that it _was_ his leg and those _were_ his toes and what he was seeing was a bedsheet hanging from the ceiling. It took him another few moments to identify the room he was in... the parlor... but certainly not arranged as he'd last seen it. There was an odd-looking chair with a boxy bottom between his bed and the next, unoccupied bed. In the far corner Jonesy lay flat on his back with pillows stuffed under his knees (the classic gynecological exam position, if you can imagine that).

Jess remembered that evil little woman coming at him with a basin of water and intent to seriously invade his personal space. He remembered falling off the bed and the sudden jarring pain when his leg hit the floor. He remembered a lot of bodies and a lot of hands picking him back up. The last thing he remembered was the evil large woman coming at him with a cloth and holding it over his face.

Of course, Jess understood what had been done to him. This certainly wasn't the first time he'd been subjected to intimate attentions from females having nothing to do with _amore_. He needed more than just the fingers of one hand to count the number of times he'd been bedbound and unable to care for himself, usually due to having been on the receiving end of a lead projectile. And, of course... the other time he'd broken a leg. It didn't matter whether he was conscious, unconscious, delirious or comatose... the after-mortification was just the same.

He was feeling pretty darn humiliated right now but had to admit he was also feeling a damned sight better than he had earlier. He was clean, he smelled nice and was generally relaxed. His head was a little sore and his leg ached though not as much as before. The fact that he still _had_ a leg was comforting in itself. Someone had taken a great deal of trouble in arranging him with his head and torso elevated so that his hip and spine weren't twingeing as they had this morning. The goosedown pillow under his head was softer and fluffier than the lumpy chicken feather one he was used to. Having a smaller pillow tucked under each elbow alleviated strain on his shoulders.

Clearly it would be churlish to complain about the quality of care he was receiving... except for those she-devils who seemed bent on drowning him or smothering him.

Jess could hear, on the other side of the curtains, the mumble of voices speaking in low tones and could see the shadows of several people moving about out there. He thought he identified one of the voices as belonging to Slim's friend Sally, the female blacksmith. What was _she_ doing here? He could smell something good simmering on the stove and hoped supper would soon be forthcoming. His stomach was grumbling in anticipation. He resolved to accept it with good grace, whatever it was and by whomever it was served.

 **Slim had told him** time and time again that his in-your-face attitude was his own worst enemy... that belligerence almost always engenders resistance rather than cooperation. And Jonesy was always trotting out platitudes about looking before leaping, thinking before acting, catching more flies with honey... maybe he should have paid more attention. Furthermore, he should have followed his own advice to Andy: Always stand clear of the stage when it's about to pull out. Acknowledging he was in no position to defend himself, he also pledged to be more cooperative.

Jess' thoughts turned to Slim and Andy... and how they were faring. Surely someone would have come and told him if anything dire had occurred... but so far no one had told or explained anything... not even how bad his own injury was... and this worried him.

Jess tried to get Jonesy's attention but the latter's head was turned away and Jess couldn't tell if the man was asleep or ignoring him. Jonesy was dressed in odd clothing Jess had never seen before, which was when he discovered that he was identically attired... an oversized button-front shirt with a collar and a pocket on the chest but no cuffs on the sleeves, and loose-legged pants with a drawstring waist, both of airy, soft baby blue cotton flannel.

The curtains swished apart as another Amazonian woman entered and pulled them closed behind her. At least, Jess thought it was a different woman at first until he realized it was same one in different clothes... a fresh starched white apron over a black blouse and long black skirt. Her corona had been unraveled and loosely replaited in a single long salt-and-pepper braid that hung over one shoulder. Her face wore an almost friendly expression and her voice was more of a pleasant contralto than what he recalled from hours earlier.

"Feeling any better, Mister Harper?"

"Yes m'am... and it's just Jess. 'Mister Harper' makes me feel like I'm standin' in front of a judge." He could have sworn he almost saw a twinkle in her grey eyes. "I apologize for the trouble I caused earlier. It won't happen again." (Meant fervently at that moment although his resolve to be good would weaken in days to come.)

"Apology accepted. It'll be much easier for everyone that way..."

"Yes, m'am... but m'am..."

"Miss Emma."

"Miss Emma... could you please tell me what's going on... what's all this..." He gestured toward the rest of the room. "What's this thing on my leg? Where's Slim and Andy... are they...?"

 **Emmaline had come in** prepared to be brusque with her charge but was disarmed by the worry on his face and the distress radiating from those blue eyes. Instead, she sat primly on the edge of the unoccupied bed and folded her hands in her lap.

"Slim is very ill. He may be coming down with bronchitis or influenza—too early to tell. We're doing everything we can to prevent this from turning into lung fever..."

"Can I talk to him?"

"Well... you could talk _at_ him but he has laryngitis and can't answer back... and in answer to your next question, Andy has contracted measles. Both of them have fevers and need to be in darkened, quiet rooms, so I've segregated them from those of you who don't."

"Why's Jonesy in bed?"

"Jonesy is temporarily incapacitated with severe back pain. He'll be on his feet within a week if he follows the doctor's instructions."

"And my leg... am I gonna lose it?" Although Jess spoke calmly it was impossible to not feel the fear behind his soft words.

Emmaline stood up and moved to the foot of the bed, running a fingernail along Jess' exposed toes. "Can you feel that?"

"Yeah... it tickles..."

"That—and the fact that your toes are pink and healthy—indicates adequate blood circulation. There's no reason why your leg shouldn't heal properly... again, if you follow the protocol..."

"Protocol?"

Emmaline resumed her seat on the bed. "The plaster cast will keep your leg immobile until the bones knit—it was a very bad fracture, by the way. In two more days the plaster will have set solid enough that you'll be able to get around in a wheelchair or possibly on crutches. In four weeks Doctor Whatleigh will cut the cast off and examine your leg to see how well it's coming along, then he'll replace it with a smaller, lighter cast from below the knee to the ankle. That one stays on for another three weeks but you'll still need crutches."

"But I'll be able to ride with it?"

Emmaline sighed. "I'm afraid not... not right away... you'll first need physical therapy for your knee and ankle..."

"But there ain't nothin' wrong with 'em... it's my leg that's broke!"

"I hate to burst your bubble, Jess, but your knee and ankle aren't going to work right away. Christmas will be here before you'll be able to put your full weight on that leg again."

 **Emmaline paused to let** that unwelcome information sink in, watching the hopefulness in his eyes slowly transform to defeat... almost certain she knew what he was thinking: that he wouldn't be able to pull his share of the work around here, that he'd be a useless burden on the Sherman family... and that he didn't have any place else to go or any kin who cared. Her heart went out to him... she'd seen so many like Jess Harper... men who could be fun and loving and even playful but capable of terrifying violence when the world closed in on them and their backs were to the wall.

Emmaline was glad the wisdom of her years provided protection from the mistake a younger woman might have made. It was so easy—so very tempting—for a woman to convince herself she could fix a broken man and make his life whole again. Throughout recorded history women had torn their hearts apart trying to do this. Emmaline, who was a devout believer in evolution, imagined many a prehistoric female sitting alone in her cave by a campfire, crying her eyes out after failing to dissuade her mate from sallying forth with club in hand to boink his neighbors.

Was it truly possible for a man to put away his gun and assume a cloak of respectability? Yes, Emmaline thought but only if it was his own determination to do so.

"What about my hand?"

"The good news is that your fingers aren't broken. The bad news is Doctor Whatleigh believes you have torn ligaments and tendons which will also take several weeks to heal... you will experience difficulty using that hand in the meantime."

Jess couldn't suppress a moan of despair. "I can't live like this."

"Of course you can. And you will. Let me ask you this... how many times have you been shot?"

"Can't remember right offhand... I'd hafta think on it."

"But you've managed to survive..."

"Yeah but..."

"Look on the bright side: this will all be over in three months. It could be worse, you know. You could be a woman... pregnant for nine months... throwing up your guts every day for the first three and then carrying around a watermelon in your belly for the last two, not to mention having to squirt it out..."

Finally... a weak grin... and a blush. "Okay, okay... I get the picture." He'd never heard a woman speak quite so bluntly about a subject that was usually considered private female business.

Emmaline was intent on getting her point across—that he ought to count himself lucky to be a man with a broken leg rather than a woman in _any_ condition. Jess was embarrassed enough... but he had another discomfiting subject he needed to bring up...

"Miss Emma?"

"Yes... how am I going to... what I mean to say is, when I need to... you know?"

"Ah... well... that's what this little beauty is for." She tapped the arm of the commode chair between the beds, which was when Jess noticed the package of Gayetty's tissue on the seat. But before he could express his indignation, she continued. "Doctor Whatleigh has arranged for the Koski brothers to stay here for as long as necessary. They'll be living in their campwagon out by the corral to take care of the stock and the stage and will also be serving as orderlies for, shall we say... personal needs. I hope that will satisfy your sensibilities?"

"Yes, m'am, I reckon it will."

"Splendid. Now, if there are no other questions, I need to help with dinner..." Emmaline stood up.

"I do. Have another question, I mean..."

"And that would be?"

"If Andy and Slim are in the back bedroom, who's sleeping in the front bedroom?"

"Myself and my cook-housekeeper Peach—the Oriental lady you met earlier? I'm assuming we'll be here several weeks so you two will have to come to an accommodation. But don't worry, tonight I'll personally be your server... if that's all right with you?"

"Yes, m'am... that'll be just fine! Thank you." Spoken with a genuine smile this time.

"I'll be back in a little while soon as we've got the others settled." She turned to leave.

"Wait a minute... Miss Emma... who's this third bed for?"

"We have a guest patient... an unfortunate traveler who managed to fall under his horse. He'll be with us for some time, I'm afraid, so you'll have company. I'll introduce you after dinner..."


	15. Chapter 15

_CHAPTER FIFTEEN—PART ONE_

 **A COLLISION OF COINCIDENCES**

" _ **May dragons take flight in your dreams tonight!"**_ _(Jess C. Scott)_

 **Early evening...** The reason Young Doc hadn't been able to return that day was that the entire township of Laramie was in a collective uproar over the measles epidemic. The streets were choked with all manner of vehicles bearing victims from the outlands demanding medical attention. Exactly as Sally had described, all four doctors' offices were swarming with overwrought mothers beseeching overworked nurses to attend their snuffling, sniffling, scratching, whining and crying offspring. The doctors—Whatleigh, Gutennacht, Dempsey and Makepeace—hid out in the Prairie Rose's parlor where they could confer in private long enough to form a battle plan and work out a rotation whereby two of them could hit the road to visit stricken families unable to make it to town while the other two manned their own and one of the other's clinics. In the afternoons they'd switch around.

Word had also filtered in that the plague had reached the Sioux reservation not too far off and that the natives there were dropping like flies. The Laramie doctors concluded there really wasn't much they could do about this other than notify the federal Office of Indian Affairs of the situation. They had their hands full as it was.

Any former medic or orderly they knew of was contacted and asked to help with male victims. A call was put out for all females with any nursing experience at all to pitch in with women and children patients. When the pharmacy ran out of meds, urgent telegrams were dispatched to Cheyenne for drugs to be forwarded on the next scheduled train along with whatever medical people were willing to volunteer. Foster care and wetnurses had to be arranged for infants whose mothers were too ill to feed their own babies. The temperance registration drive was cancelled and the grange hall turned into a makeshift hospital.

The sheriff pressed all reserve deputies into service to prevent rioting or looting and appointed Lowenstein Livery's stable manager Avery Jackson as special deputy in charge of clearing the streets of abandoned vehicles and collecting all the horses and mules left unattended where unfortunates who had ridden or driven them into town had collapsed and been carried away on stretchers. Avery drove all the vehicles to the outskirts of town and parked them in a row. The beasts of burden were turned into the livery's pasture where they could be fed and watered—it's what Sally herself would have done. But first Avery trotted Sally's young son Jacob over to the Wings for safekeeping along with his and Martha's two children.

Young Doc had asked Emmaline's business partner Vidalia if she could spare any of their courtesans, seeing as how business wasn't going to be flourishing anytime soon, and she was happy to oblige. All their girls'd had cowpox and were immune and, of course, had exquisite bedside manners. They had all come from good families (originally) and most had some expertise in domestic arts... including looking after sick people. The PR girls were required to dress and act demurely outside the workplace and in public were indistinguishable from, say, the preacher's daughters. (These were pre-employment requisites.) None of the distraught mothers seemed to know (or if they did, didn't give a damn) that their precious offspring were being bathed, fed and medicated by fallen women.

It was civil war of a natural nature... not men against men but against invisible invaders.

 **Consequently,** it wasn't until late morning that Young Doc was able to squeeze in a visit to Wing Chen Li. After swearing on his honor that he'd been carbolically antisepticized, pore and follicle, his mother-in-law Willow allowed him inside the house.

Lee received Young Doc in his ostentatiously-appointed study designed to replicate a British gentlemen's club and waved him over to the seating area where Lychee, who had preceded him by fifteen minutes, was already installed. The two men had been studying a drawing spread on the coffee table. With a start Young Doc recognized it as Kim's tattoo. "Where'd you get that?"

"Yo, Freedo..." Lychee greeted him, "I was just telling Uncle Lee about your new patient. Lucky sketched this from memory right after we got home. We were out at the ranch delivering all that crap you and Auntie Em said you needed."

"Stealing my thunder, eh?" Young Doc said. "As it happens, that's exactly what I've come to talk about, Lee... not the tattoo itself but the young man who wears it."

"Yes... Lychee believes he's an island boy. Do you concur?" Lee Wing said.

"Absolutely... and I have some concerns on the matter..."

"Come... let's get comfortable and discuss them..."

 **Without being summoned** in any way apparent to Young Doc, a pretty young serving maid immediately materialized bearing a silver tray on which reposed three filigreed crystal wine goblets. From the sideboard she produced a cut-glass decanter containing Lee's favorite Portuguese port—José Maria da Fonseca—and filled the goblets. After presenting to each man the cedar box containing Por Larranaga cigars, she bowed and just as silently withdrew.

With introductory ceremonial sips and puffs out of the way, Lee indicated he was ready to hear more about the mysterious stranger. As Lychee had already communicated the situation over at the Sherman's spread, Young Doc went straight to presentation of his suspicions.

Lee listened attentively, nodding or inserting a question from time to time. He examined the paper with the two chop impressions and laid it on the table next to the drawing. Young Doc explained how the carved knob on the larger seal corresponded to the tattoo, concluding with, "So what are your thoughts?"

"First of all..." Lee began slowly in his crisp Oxford-educated English, "...let me assure you this young man is not one of mine. It's possible he's someone else's... but I doubt it. The weapons you describe could certainly be those of a mercenary or a triad gang member... but not necessarily. If he were an operative on a mission and didn't want you to see his tattoo, you would already be dead.

"The fact of his attempting to disguise himself as something and someone else does point to his being a fugitive of some sort. And with that sort of cash on his person, one's immediate assumption would be robber, thief or a gambler... again, not necessarily. With these seal chops..." Lee pointed to the paper, "he would have ready access to cash at certain larger banking institutions anywhere there exists a sizeable Chinese community. The most likely scenario would be one-time-use letters of credit sent _post restante_ and a new pickup point prearranged with each collection."

"What does the tattoo mean? Looks like a flying lizard to me..." Young Doc asked.

" **It's a dragon,"** Lychee said. "More precisely, a wood dragon."

Lee laughed. "It rather does look like a lizard, doesn't it? But Lychee's correct. How old do you make this young man out to be?"

"Seventeen, eighteen..." Lychee piped up. "Got a face like as a girl's."

"Oh no... older than that," Young Doc contradicted, "Mid-twenties at least. He's small but he's got a grown man's physique... it's the Asian in him makes him look younger, just like you, Lychee."

Lee said, "If he's twenty-six I'd say both the tattoo and the larger seal represent his birth year—1844 was a year of the _yinglong_ , which is the wood dragon. However... it could also signify a family affiliation with the House of Chen..."

"So he could be related to you and Lychee?" Young Doc asked ingenuously.

"Oh please!" Lee tittered. "The surname 'Chen' is the equivalent of your 'Smith' or 'Jones'... every fifth Chinese baby is a 'Chen'. What I was about to say is that there are dozens of offshoots of the Chen clan but only one subhouse... coincidentally based in Hawai'i... that claims the _yinglong_ as its house symbol. A jade chop would indicate association with a wealthy family and the island Chens are rolling in it."

"He looks more white than Oriental," Young Doc offered.

"That would be about right... the last two or three generations of Hawai'ian Chens have intermarried with Europeans to the extent that there isn't a one left who can claim pure Chinese lineage. Even if he's only one-sixteenth or less he still qualifies for recognition as a clan member with all the attendant rights and privileges... just as your own children will."

"What about the smaller chop?" Young Doc asked. "I'm guessing it's a personal seal."

"Indeed it is. Now that one's most peculiar... the central feature is the letter 'K' but the inscription surrounding it is somewhat unusual: 'HIC SVNT DRACONES'... Latin for 'Here are dragons'—but in _hanzi_. Back when the world was still flat, cartographers used this to denote dangerous or unexplored territories and uncharted seas. There's also the word 'KIM' which indicates it is indeed a personal chop. 'Kim' can be either a surname or a given name... again, quite common either way. As you surmised, it is indeed real ivory… which means there's money behind it."

"What about the ring I found... and the inscription... 'Ysabel 3 June 1860'? Could he possibly have been married at, say, sixteen?"

"I would say yes to that. Quite probable, in fact... all those noble houses are famous for arranging advantageous pairings at very young ages in order to consolidate assets. And some not so noble houses, if you recall!" Here Lee leered at Young Doc and raised an eyebrow.

"I beg your pardon?!" Young Doc huffed.

"Oh come now, Freddy... don't be so naive! Why do you think Willow and I allowed our sixteen-year-old daughter to marry a white man eleven years her senior? Surely not because she fancied herself in love! No... you just happened to be the most eligible suitor at the time and in possession of skills we favored incorporating into our family. But as you've been an exemplary husband and of superior benefit to us, we have no cause whatsoever to regret that decision."

"And here I always thought it was because you liked me!"

"Cradlerobber!" Lychee muttered, only half in jest.

"Let us get back to the subject at hand, which is... what is it you wish me to do?"

Young Doc confessed he was completely out of his depth. "What do you suggest?"

 **Lee shrugged.** "Appearances can be deceiving. For the sake of argument, let's say he's triad—modern triads are trying to move away from the hooligan image. He may well be one of the newer, more sophisticated order, in which case caution is advisable. So, if you truly believe you're in real danger, I can arrange for my household security to discreetly dispose of the problem altogether..."

"No, no... I don't want him _dead_ —he's my _patient_ , for Pete's sake," Young Doc protested, "I just want him... er... _contained_ , is all... until we have some solid evidence one way or another."

"Are you sure?" Lee queried. "What's one assassin more or less? I'll even throw in that other one as _lagniappe_..."

"What other one? Who do you mean?" Young Doc was confused.

"That gunfighter... what's his name?" (Lee had never personally met Jess Harper.)

"Let's not be hasty, Honorable Uncle," Lychee intervened.

"You mean Jess Harper?" Doc was horrified.

"Yes yes yes... that's the one. Half the people in town are afraid of him anyway and..."

"No! Absolutely not! He's not that anymore... he's... reformed!"

"Honorable Son-in-Law..." Lee intoned, rolling his eyes and exuding smoke rings, "leopards do not change their spots. I'm beginning to think I should like to meet both this master gunman and adolescent gangster in person. Can you bring them to me?"

Young Doc reiterated why his patients weren't physically able to travel at present.

Lee scratched an ear, giving a sly smile. "I take it your visitor's presence is not public knowledge as yet?"

"Only to the Koski brothers and my own family... well, and the people at the ranch, naturally."

"Best keep it that way as long as you can, then. You say he claims to be a halfbreed Indian?"

"He hasn't actually _claimed_ anything but that's certainly the impression he's trying to give."

"Well... what's the harm in letting him continue to be that? If you're still worried, I can have people keep an eye on him. You'll never see them, but they'll be there."

"I'd appreciate that, Lee, though Slim won't be happy about strangers lurking about on his property."

"I understand the town council is discouraging travel outside the county until this epidemic has run its course."

"We can't prevent anyone from leaving if they're determined to do so, but we're advising against it in the interest of not spreading the disease any farther."

"How long do you expect the epidemic to last?"

"Since we're already about a week into it, it should peak fairly soon. Another two weeks should see the end of it. So, let's say... by the end of the month?"

"All right then... Poot's going to San Francisco on the evening train. I'll send these items along with him and while he's there he can make inquiries. Understand that this might require a few weeks. If he happens on to any useful information he can forward that via telegraph—we have our own code. In the meantime, perhaps it would be best to keep this conversation among ourselves and not confront the young man with what we _think_ we know."

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Lee's Number Two son was Wing Feng, which means 'Silent Wind'. Invariably, he was known as 'Poot.')_

" **I think you're right, Lee...** and thanks for your help and advice. I've already told Emmaline everything I know and suspect. Slim Sherman doesn't know anything about this yet... I'll have to tell him, though. When he's up and about we don't want him accidently shooting at any of your men thinking they're trespassers. And Sally... she's out there right now... she probably needs to know."

"Why not take out a full page ad in the paper, Freedo?" Lychee said drolly. "Chink Gangster In Town—Hide Your Rice Bowls!"

"Not funny," Young Doc said. "But you're probably right... this should stay among the three of us for now... well, four of us—but I did ask Em to keep it to herself."

"Actually... I feel terribly sorry for all of them..." Lee commented, drawing on his cigar.

"Sorry? Why?" Young Doc asked.

"Imagine having Emmaline as your keeper! No offense to your charming aunt."

Lychee and Young Doc both chuckled and the meeting was concluded.

 _CHAPTER FIFTEEN—PART TWO_

 **THE FIELD HOSPITAL FOLLIES**

" _ **Anything that can go wrong will go wrong and if nothing has gone wrong, you've obviously not understood the situation."**_ _(Unattributed)_

 **Mid-evening...** Activities at the Sherman ranch were winding down. Supper had been got through without difficulty. Emmaline helped Jess manage his beef and barley soup (with a soupçon of laudanum) and he nodded off shortly thereafter, still not having been introduced to the newbie. Peach puttered around the table (in a much improved mood) serving Jonesy, Andy and Kim. Not yet ready for bed, Jonesy retreated to the rocker by the fireplace to catch up on the week's worth of _Laramie Daily Sentinels_ that Lychee had kindly remembered to bring him. Slim accepted a cup of broth but otherwise wasn't hungry. Before retiring to his tented bed he conveyed to Andy via written note that just because he was sick didn't mean he got to skip schoolwork and that he was to get on it as soon as the table was cleared.

"Aw, Slim!" Andy pouted, though knowing Slim would check up to make sure he'd done it. Slim drew up lesson plans a month ahead of time and was ruthless about keeping to the schedule.

No objections were voiced when Kim announced he was going to sit on the porch for a while. On the way out he passed Sally on the way in as Emmaline had called to her that it was time for the women to get their supper.

It was too dark to read but that was all right. The porch rocker had been restored to its customary spot. Between the light glowing through the parlor window above and the first quarter moon riding high in the sky, Kim could see well enough to easily roll a couple of slender joints. Firing one up, he observed the shadowy bulks of the horses in the pasture across the road. A few were lying down, most were standing still, hipshot and dozing. A couple were desultorily still grazing. Scooter, being the lightest colored one, was easy to pick out. Over by the corral, two of the Koskis had a campfire going and were singing offkey. Kim wondered where the third one was. Other than the ongoing ache in his ribs, he was feeling pretty damned good, all things considered, and was expecting to feel even better very shortly.

Presently Feets came around the corner, acknowledging Kim's presence with a nod, and poked his head through the open door to broadcast that the bathhouse was now ready for the ladies. He was summoned inside to hold the fort while the three women filed out with their nightwear and bath-related gear and trooped off to do their nightly ablutions.

 **Kim lit up the second joint.** Thirty minutes later he was feeling terrific, also verging on sleepy... which was good. Deciding to turn in, he stood up... which was when he noticed a lone basket sitting at the very far corner of the porch, apparently overlooked by Peach and everyone else bringing stuff into the house. It was a medium-sized oval reed basket with a handle, its contents covered with a length of faded gingham. Without thinking (and feeling hardly any pain) he picked it up and carried it inside.

Other baskets that hadn't yet been unpacked were in a corner of the kitchen under and on the piano bench or sitting on the piano itself. He left the new one in a vacant spot on the floor and headed for the bed that had been pointed out to him as his. Jonesy had fallen asleep in the rocker with a newspaper over his face. Feets was snoring lustily in the easy chair facing the fireplace. Andy was face down in his geography book with his head cradled in his arms.

The drapes partitioning the back of the parlor had been kept drawn so that the light beaming down from the overhead lamp wouldn't be shining directly in Jess' eyes. Kim had entered and already pulled off the pajama top (he was a little too warm at this point) before he got his first good look at his new wardmate—the guy with the broken leg—who was also asleep but evidently having an unpleasant dream from the way he was twitching, grimacing and making little moaning noises. (Jess was in fact experiencing a mini-nightmare featuring—unfortunately—bows and arrows and body-painted bloodthirsty savages with knives although Kim wasn't to know this.)

Kim was taking a moment to check out the plaster cast—something he'd never seen before—when he spied the ominous black gunbelt hanging off the fellow's headboard, with a weapon that appeared bigger than it actually was and ten times as lethal. He slowly backed away. This was so not good. Not good at all. There was no way he could rest next to... _a gunfighter_. At least, not unprotected. But there wasn't any other place _to_ sleep... the fainting couch being piled high with unfolded laundry. Kim automatically went into silent running mode, padding across the room in his bare feet and stealthily opening the library cabinet door. His hand felt around until it closed first on the river pirate knife (too big to be secreted under a pillow) and then on the throwing knife (just the right size). He trod carefully back to the sleeping area. He'd just sat on side of the bed when he realized he'd left a gap in the drapes that would allow the light to shine in _his_ eyes. Bugger. He stood up again with a sigh and reached out both hands to pull the curtains together, still holding the knife in his right hand.

Which is when a lusty squall shattered the stillness...

 **Kim froze.** Andy, Jonesy and Feets jerked awake. So did Jess, fighting to consciousness through the shreds of his busy dream and not altogether in the here and now. All he could see in the dimness of the partitioned area was a shirtless not-quite-silhouette with a knife in its hand and a painted design on its back. He arrived at an instantaneous and obvious identification.

Shouting at the top of his lungs "INDIANS! INDIANS!" Jess reached up and snatched that gun out of its holster and attempted to fire it, which didn't work so well... first of all because he was trying to shoot with his left hand and secondly because there weren't any bullets in it.

Kim, scared out of his wits, hollered "WHERE?! WHERE?!" (forgetting _he_ was supposed to be the Indian) and nosedived to the floor between his bed and Jonesy's, the knife skittering out of his hand and under the bed.

Jonesy, flinging newspapers into the air, was yelling "WHAT?! WHAT INDIANS?!"

Andy was screeching "SLIM! HELP! INDIANS!" and crawled under the table.

Slim hurtled out of the bedroom brandishing the shotgun he kept behind the door in there and croaking, "EVYBUDDY GED DOWD!"

Feets was yapping "VOT INCHUNS?! VERE?!" He jumped for the first weapon to hand—Jonesy's loaded shotgun in the rack over the fireplace. Wrenching open the outside door, he fired both barrels into the dark.

Peach's finches were chittering madly and battering themselves against the cage bars. Feathers and birdseed flittered from under the cage cover.

 **Outside, over at the vardo,** Oxtoe and Roop leaped out of their campchairs, knocking them over and spilling into the campfire their tin cups of 190-proof grain alcohol (having run out of both akvavit and vodka and resorting to moonshine), resulting in a conflagration that threatened to consume the awning. Wielding _their_ shotguns, they fired indiscriminately at anything in sight that appeared to be moving. Fortunately, they didn't hit any of the pastured horses which were running in a frenzied band along the fenceline... around and around like the carved wooden ponies on a carousel, screaming as only thoroughly frightened horses can. Every chicken in the coop was squawking as if ten foxes were loose in there.

The women in the bathhouse—in varying states of _déshabillé_ —were confounded, not knowing which way to jump... especially when a loose spray pattern of pellet punctures appeared in one of the canvas walls, uncomfortably close to Emmaline's ear. They were confused as well when all the pandemonium ceased abruptly—other than sporadic shotgun blasts and the sustained wailing of what sounded like an angry, exceedingly desperate baby.

Everyone inside the house had stopped shouting at once because nothing else happened. Except for that awful keening emanating from one of the baskets in the corner of the kitchen.

"Wuddid ell izzat?" Slim grukked.

Jonesy and Feets stared at each other, completely fuddled as newsprint fluttered to the floor all around them. Andy crawled out from under the table.

Jess was examining his gun with consternation, wondering how he'd managed to shoot an Indian when there were no bullets in the goldurn thing. He knew he'd hit him. He saw him go down... right there on the floor on the other side of the next bed. He couldn't _see_ him but he _knew_ he was there, by gum.

Kim wasn't doing, thinking or saying anything at all, having blacked out momentarily—partly from pain brought on by hitting the floor but mostly from fright at being shot at close range (convinced he'd been shot, anyway).

No one moved.

 **Andy spoke first.** "Uh... Slim? It kinda sounds like a baby..." He pointed a finger. "Comin' from over there, I think."

Slim was dumbfounded. How in hell did a baby get into his house?

"Um... Slim? Shouldn't you go look?"

"Shouldn't someone come and get this dead Indian outta here..." came Jess' voice from behind the curtain.

That got everyone's attention.

"What dead Indian?" Jonesy asked loudly, as if Jess couldn't hear through a bedsheet.

"Oh shid," Slim mouthed as realization swept over him who the deceased had to be... although he hadn't heard any gunshots except Feets at the front door and the two other Koskis still defending the perimeter with an occasional volley at imaginary attackers. (The next morning two raccoons and a flying squirrel were found to have perished in the fusillade.)

The wailing had subsided to an ongoing bawling but still nobody made a move toward the basket.

The front door flew open and Emmaline blasted in—foaming at the mouth, flames shooting out of her ears—shouting "What the (unladylike and unprintable word) is going on in here?!" Behind her were Sally and Peach. All three were in passionkiller flannel nightgowns and unfastened wrappers, their damp unbound hair flapping behind them.

"Can you children not be left unsupervised for _one_ (insert vulgarism of your choice here) _moment?_ " Emmaline pointed a finger at Feets, who was looking around for a piece of furniture large enough to hide behind. " _YOU!_ You were supposed to be minding them... _OUT! OUT!_ "

Feets scuttled for the door like a chipmunk with its tail ablaze.

"And what is that (yet another obscene adjective here) _NOISE?_ Is that a (any naughty word will suffice) _BABY?_ Who brought a baby in here?" The Finger swiveled around, looking for a guilty face. Every one of them looked guilty although none of them had the slightest clue.

"I repeat... _WHERE_ did that _BABY_ come from?!"

"Dode loog ad be," Slim gurgled. "Ah didded do id."

"Me neither," Andy quickly chimed in.

"Ain't my fault," Jonesy shrugged. "Maybe it crawled in here on its own."

"Forget about the baby!" shouted the voice from beyond. "What about the Indian?"

"What Indian? What's he talking about?" Emmaline demanded, momentarily distracted. "And where's Sky?"

"Who's Sky?" Jess complained loudly. "And who cares... just get the..."

Emmaline stomped over to the partition and tore the curtains open. Jess was still holding the pistol. She leaned over and wrenched it out of his hands. "Idiot!" Then she backed up and saw Kim balled up like a hedgehog on the floor between the two bedsteads, his arms protectively wrapped around his head.

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Are you all right?"

One arm moved aside and one golden eye glittered up at her. "That maniac shot me."

"No he didn't. The gun wasn't loaded. You can get up now."

"I can't move. I can't breathe."

"If you can talk, you can breathe."

"I think I'm having a heart attack."

"No, you're not. If anything you're having a panic attack. Get over it. If you were having a heart attack you wouldn't be running off at the mouth."

"I'm gonna throw up."

"Not on my clean floor, you're not. Now get up."

Kim uncurled himself and slowly got to his knees, cautiously sticking his head above the plane of the mattress. Jess got excited all over again. "There he is... _Get him! Get him!_ "

"Oh, for God's sake!" Emmaline reached down and hauled Kim to his feet. "Get a grip on yourself, Mister Harper!" Next to her, Kim looked like a half-dressed elf. Jess fell silent, suddenly feeling somewhat foolish.

"A splendid time for introductions, I should think. Jess, meet Sky Lizard, ignoble savage. Sky, meet Jess Harper, scourge of the high plains." Emmaline could be bitingly sarcastic when she put her mind to it. She dragged Kim away to the kitchen and deposited him in a chair at the table, out of Jess' sight.

"Peach... tea, please... chop-chop." Peach relit the stove and put a kettle on. Emmaline laid a hand on Kim's shoulder. "Sorry about that. It was an honest mistake on his part. You'll feel better after you've calmed down a bit and had some tea."

Kim could only grunt in response. He was shaking like a leaf and his heart was racing. Sure... he might feel better... in a week or so... or a month... or a year. If he lived that long. This was the second time in less than two days that someone had pointed a gun at him. These people were nuts. And dangerous. He felt like a cat that had already used up eight lives.


	16. Chapter 16

_CHAPTER SIXTEEN—PART ONE_

 **INGENUITY AND THE FOUNDLING**

" _ **People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one."**_ _(Leo J. Burke)_

 **A half-hour later...** In the meantime, Sally had extracted the infant from the basket—a wet and hungry papoose no more than a day or so old. "Well, well... look what we've got here."

"Yes... and what do you propose we _do_ with it?" Emmaline barked.

"Change its nappy and feed it," Sally retorted briskly. "Aunt Em, can you find me some flannel? An old union suit will do... there's clean ones over there in the laundry pile."

"Feed it how?" Emmaline snorted.

Sally shook her head in exasperation. "Same way I'd feed any other little orphan if there weren't any spare tits around. Peach... would you warm up some water? Matt... would you happen to still have some old kid gloves of your mother's?"

Slim nodded affirmatively. "Dey id attig id trug. Ah go ged deb. "

"I'd better be the one to go up there," Andy volunteered. "Did you mean they're in Ma's travel trunk?"

"Yez…"

"I'll need a glass bottle with a small neck, twine, scissors, funnel, washrag, towels, safety pins..." Sally added.

"Ah cad ged dose iv Jodesy tell be wha to ook."

"I can't understand a word you're saying," Sally said.

Jonesy spoke up from his post. "I think he's sayin' he'll get the stuff if I tell him where to look…"

"Get on with it, then!"

 **Once the items had been assembled,** Emmaline leveled The Finger. "Show's over, boys... back to bed, on the double."

Jonesy wasted no time crawling into his bed, readjusting his pillows and pulling the quilt up to his ears. He'd had quite enough excitement for one day, thank you very much. Andy looked over his shoulder as he followed Slim to their room. "Is it a boy or a girl?"

"Let you know in the morning. Good night," Sally called after them. She made to hand the child over to Emmaline. "Hold please, while I cut up some diapers." But Emmaline backed away as if she'd been offered a live snake.

"Oh no. Oh my no. No no no... you saw it first!"

"But Aunt Em..."

"No, m'am. Absolutely not..."

They were both surprised when Kim spoke up in a tone they hadn't heard before. "Give me that child..." he said softly, holding out his hands in the universal palm-ups 'give it over' gesture. Strangely enough, just the sight of the baby had calmed him down instantly and banished the jitters. The pain was still there, radiating fiercely, but he ignored it.

"What do you know about...?" Sally started to question.

"Just give it to me... please." He took the bundle, supporting the head exactly right and holding the baby in the crook of his arm. Cradled against a bare chest, the baby ceased whimpering and started nuzzling, astonishing not only aunt and niece but the Chinese servant who was the only certified childminder among them.

"Er... I don't believe you've got what it's after," Sally remarked.

"No... but I've got body heat and a heartbeat that's comforting until you deliver the goods," Kim retorted with a wry grin. "And by the way... my name's Kim... Kim Sky Lizard."

All three women were regarding him as if he'd just descended from another planet.

Under other circumstances and in a proper environment like a nursery or the clinic, and with appropriate supplies and a lactating mother, _Nurse Emma_ could've dealt with a newborn. Here, she was at a loss. And Peach's experience was thirty years old. Sally and Kim seemed to know what they were doing so Emmaline decided it would be best to let them carry on with it. Odds were the child wouldn't live anyway.

"I'll just go have a talk with Jess," she said and left when no one paid her any attention.

 **Peach brought Kim his tea** and beamed at his effusive thankyous, then hustled back to the stove to continue concocting formula for the baby—cow's milk from which the butterfat had been skimmed, thinned with well water and sweetened with a teaspoonful of blackstrap molasses. Ideally, it should have been boiled and allowed to cool, but as they had no idea how long the child had gone without nourishment it needed to be fed soon, before it became any more dehydrated.

Sally scissored fingertips off the kid gloves, enlarging the holes with one of Jonesy's darning needles, and putting them in the boiling water to be sterilized along with the twine, the bottle and the funnel. Armed with diapers hastily cut from a union suit, a basin of lukewarm soapy water, the washrag, a folded towel and a tin of salve (a new product called 'Vaseline' that had just that year come on the market), Sally prepared to unswaddle that baby, taking it from Kim's arms.

The infant turned out to be a girl, which immediately started whimpering and then crying in earnest. She was an exquisite little thing with copper skin and a thick thatch of blue-black hair, but stunk to high heaven. By the time Sally had her cleaned up, diapered and rebundled, Peach had the improvised bottle ready with the formula. Although Sally was now coddling the infant, Peach for some reason chose to hand the bottle over to Kim instead.

Both women were fascinated when he very competently shook out a few drops of formula on his inner wrist and pronounced it good to go, handing the bottle over to Sally.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _A pint whiskey bottle with a kid-glove nipple tied on with string may not have been the optimum solution but it was all they had—indeed, it saved many an orphan infant in the absence of a wetnurse.)_

 **Peach fixed her own cup** of tea and sat down at the table, alternately watching Sally feeding the baby... and watching Kim intently watching Sally. A highly intriguing and thought-provoking development. Forty-plus years of serving _gweilos_ in one capacity or another (considering her former occupation)—thirty of them as an integral part of one family—had provided her with an uncommon insight (for a native Chinese) into how white people behaved, if not into their illogical thought processes. By now she understood that Kim wasn't altogether white... that he shared—in some small measure—her ethnicity.

Although Peach was fanatically devoted to Emmaline (all the Whatleighs, in fact), she and her employer had never enjoyed the sort of relationship that involved a mutual unburdening of innermost feelings. If anything, she was closest to Sally, who had come into her charge at the age of two. Sally had been the most adept at learning a second language when the boys—Wilfred, Luca and Lindsay—were just learning to talk. Peach was the only real mother Sally could remember as Emmaline wasn't maternally inclined to speak of.

Peach was very good at keeping her observations and opinions to herself, but it had been some time since she and Sally had had an in-depth discussion about life, the universe and everything. Peach also knew about Sally's and Mr. Sherman's 'arrangement' and she could see that it was about time for an update on Sally's love life. Otherwise, there was going to be trouble.

Mr. Sherman was a decent man and would have made a good husband, but he wasn't in love with Sally any more than she was in love with him. The thing about Sally... she was a one-man-at-a-time woman, which you could hardly describe as promiscuous. Whenever she was ready to move on, she always severed an existing relationship first—amicably, if possible, but firmly. And that's where the trouble would come from. No man appreciates being cast aside, however delicately done... not even a gentleman like Mr. Sherman. In Peach's keen estimation, a shift in alliances was looming on the far horizon... as yet unknown to the parties involved.

There's just something about a tiny, sweet-smelling contented baby that induces an aura of serenity among adults surrounding it. No one spoke. What an odd quartet they made: a sixty-year-old Chinese woman; a thirty-something one-hundred-percent white woman; a twenty-something part-white/part-Chinese/part-whatever man... and a day-old Sioux infant.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _Kinda makes you wanna boohoo and sling snot, don't it?)_

 _CHAPTER SIXTEEN—PART TWO_

 **A PLACE FOR EVERYONE**

" _ **All God's critters got a place in the choir."**_ _(Bill Staines)_

 **Late night...** Meanwhile—around the corner and behind the bedsheet partition—having been left to stew in the aftermath of yet another imbroglio he himself had caused, Jess Harper pulled the quilt up to his nose and turned his head to the wall. He was mad, sad, upset and confused all at the same time... and scared, although he'd never in a million years admit that to anyone else and truly didn't want to admit to himself.

In his mind, every time something bad happened since he'd arrived on the ranch, it always either involved him or he was the instigator. Trouble simply wouldn't leave him alone and every incident jeopardized his future here. Up until five months ago, Jess hadn't pondered overmuch on his future... drifting as fate and whims took him, getting by as best he could with a vague expectation that eventually—someday—he'd meet up with a gun faster than his own. And that, as they say, would be that.

Then the unforeseen had happened: he'd stumbled upon this unconventional little family and before he knew it had been adopted— _adopted!_ —into it. A man who could barely remember what it was to be part of a family had inadvertently acquired a 'brother', a 'nephew' and an 'uncle' in all but name. It had not been his intention or desire to stay here forever—he had, after all, been on his way to other business elsewhere. Yet here he still was—liking it, getting more and more comfortable with it... and profoundly grateful for whatever powers that be that had led him here.

Jess remained acutely aware that he still had a long way to go in acclimating himself to a family environment, to keeping his emotions in check—particularly anger, to conforming to the expectations of civic-minded folks in more traditional occupations and civilized habitats. A decade of rough living had forged a hard shell and habits that were nigh impossible to break or reshape to more useful purpose—wearing a sidearm at all times, for instance. Realistically, there was no pressing need to do so around the ranch or inside the house. Psychologically, he wasn't prepared to give it up just yet.

Whereas Slim was more procedure-oriented and inclined to think things out before taking action, Jess was conditioned to rely almost entirely on instinct and act on impulse. If Slim had been in his shoes (or bed, as it were) earlier, he would've probably issued a verbal warning first... or at least posed a query or two.

Jess could face almost any danger as long as he knew what it was and where it was coming from. So when he'd opened his eyes and seen what he'd seen, he'd automatically reacted without having to interpret the situation. An Indian sighted anywhere meant 'caution', an Indian in the house meant 'danger'... and an Indian five feet away with a knife in his hand meant 'kill him now'... no time for internal debates as to 'maybe' or 'let's think about this' or 'perhaps not'. Beyond that, he'd now acquired a mindset that anyone who posed a threat to any member of his new family was a danger to be eradicated expeditiously.

 **The swish of the curtains** and a whiff of rosewater announced Emmaline's entrance into the orthopedic sanctum and a metallic squeak signaled her taking a seat on the bed nearby. Jess kept his face turned away, afraid and a little ashamed to look her in the eye, expecting to be subjected to a well-deserved lecture. However could he make this woman—any woman—understand how his actions had been purely visceral and not related to any desire to shoot folks just for the hell of it?

Instead, her voice was gentle with almost motherly concern. "Is there anything I can get for you, Jess?"

"No, m'am. I'm good. Thank you."

"Jess?"

"Yes, m'am?"

"Would you look at me, please? I want to talk to you... and let's keep our voices down. Hopefully that wretched brat will go to sleep soon."

Jess slowly swiveled his head around on the pillow. "There really is a baby?"

"Unfortunately. I'm afraid it's your Indian."

"My what?" Jess squeaked. He'd misunderstood her. "No, m'am... it sure ain't mine. I ain't had nothin' to do with no squaw... I swear!"

Emmaline had to bite her tongue to keep a straight face. "I didn't mean that literally... I meant, it's the real Indian in the house... not the one you thought you saw."

Jess was losing the thread here. "Huh? But I _did_ see him. He was here. He's real... I'm tellin you... you saw him, too!"

Emmaline sighed, reminding herself that patience was a virtue and one she needed to nurture as she had so damned few of them left. "Remind me not to sneak up on you with my feathers and facepaint on."

Jess suddenly realized where he'd seen this woman before, choking "You're... You're..."

"Guilty as charged... but I'm not on duty here... not on _that_ duty, anyway.

Jess was thoroughly discombobulated... this sweet (now, though not earlier today) grandmotherly lady—in a plaid wrapper with her long gray locks streaming about her shoulders—was the proprietress of a whorehouse?!

"What's goin' on? No one's tellin me nothin'!"

"That why I'm here... to try to explain... but if you're not prepared to listen..."

"I'm listenin'! I'm listenin'!"

"All God's creatures have their place in the world, young man—even whores and madams and gunslingers and Indians... although, technically, our guest is not an Indian as such..."

"Yeah... a halfbreed... that's even worse!"

"Not even half... only a tiny little bit... hardly enough to notice," Emmaline continued placidly. _Patience, patience, patience!_ "Slim and Andy found him yesterday... he'd been involved in an accident shortly before you were. He was hurt and they brought him home. Fortunately, the doctor was already here. So you see, there's nothing to be upset or worried about. He's just a young man like yourself..."

"But what's he doin' here? He had a knife... and warpaint..."

Emmaline let her amusement show. "What you saw was ink, not paint. It's a tattoo and it doesn't wash off. I didn't see any knife."

"Well, he had one... I seen it."

"I'm sure you did, dear. I have no idea _why_ he had one but I sincerely doubt he was planning on cutting your throat with it. Perhaps he feels more comfortable with a knife at hand—same way you feel about your gun, so says Jonesy. I'm hoping you two will be able to get along so you'll be company for each other while you're both mending. Will you promise me that you'll at least try, Jess?"

"Yes, m'am. I'll try..." Jess mumbled.

"Right now it's getting late and we all need to be retiring for the evening. Would you like me to call one of the Koskis to come over and help you with the... ah... convenience? I'd really rather not disturb Slim or Andy if we can avoid it."

Jess blushed. He'd been awfully worried about how that was going to be accomplished. "Yes, m'am... if you don't mind. I'd appreciate it."

Emmaline got up. "Do you need a little shot of laudanum or would you rather try to do without?"

"Without... I ain't hurtin that bad and I sure don't wanna get hooked on that stuff!"

"Wise decision. All right then. I shall say goodnight. One of the boys will be over in a few minutes."

"Goodnight, m'am... and thanks!"

 **After Emmaline departed,** Jess mulled over this new information. Despite Miss Emma's assurances, he still had misgivings about the stranger in their midst. He and Slim shared similar views on race-mixing, had discussed it several times. Frankly, they didn't approve of it... mainly because it was usually the offspring who suffered most. Jess himself harbored no personal animosity toward people of color and was in fact quite democratic in his outlook... distrusting everyone equally until they proved to be no threat to him or anyone close to him. He well understood that just being _born_ halfbreed didn't automatically make you a bad person any more than being born into a poor white trash family made you a worthless person.

Although he'd never outright say so to Slim, he believed his experiences on the drift had equipped him with keener insights into the murky side of human nature than the rancher could begin to comprehend. Slim took everyone he met at face value—believing that what he saw was what he got. He was always surprised by betrayal whether a little bitty one or a great big injurious one. Jess' view was just the opposite: people were almost never what they appeared to be at first glance. And—from cradle to grave—everybody was capable of lying and did so whenever it suited their purposes.

This new character, whoever he was, was an anomaly—he didn't belong here, and what Jess didn't understand made him doubly wary. Indians were supposed to keep to their reservation and that included halfbreeds. The ones that didn't were suspect, no matter what Miss Emma said. But, Jess thought, he'd made a promise to _try_... and try he would, come hell or high water. Which wasn't the same as promising he'd succeed. He also had every intention of staying awake until the stranger came to bed... everything earlier had happened so quickly it was pretty much a blur and he wanted to get a real good look at his face. But his eyelids grew heavier and heavier... he was already almost gone when Roop arrived.

 **Outside the curtains,** the women were puttering around—Peach tidying up the kitchen and Emmaline picking up the scattered sheets of newsprint. Sally handed the baby back to Kim so she could remove piles of folded laundry from the fainting couch where she intended to sleep. The three women then stood in front of the fireplace to finish drying their hair and replaiting it for the night.

It suddenly occurred to Emmaline that there'd been no discussion of where Sally was to sleep that night.

"Why right there on the fainting couch, of course..."

"Sally, I hardly think it's appropriate..." Emmaline began with a prim moue.

Sally threw her head back with a laugh. "Oh Auntie Em! You run a whorehouse and I'm a blacksmith... what could be more _inappropriate?"_

"I suppose you have a point... still... it would more fitting if Peach slept out here instead of you... after all... she's elderly but you're a young female with all these... _men..._ "

Sally snickered. "First of all, I'm not about to chuck Peach out... she's worked like a dog all day and deserves to rest comfortably. Secondly, in their respective conditions, I seriously doubt any of these yahoos are capable of even lifting the hem of a nightdress, much less forcing himself on an unwilling partner!"

"There _is_ Andrew..." Emmaline mumbled.

"Get outta town! He's only thirteen!"

"You'd be astonished at what a thirteen-year-old is capable of..."

"And perhaps I'd like to be... someday. Astonished, that is..."

"Sally!"

"Just kidding. I do have _some_ morals, scruples and ethics, you know."

"I'm certainly glad to hear that."

"Indeed, yes... he'd have to be at least fifteen or sixteen."

'Sally!"

Kim, still seated at the table with the baby, overheard every word.

Emmaline made one last round of her other patients before retreating to her bedroom with Peach. The sleeping baby was bundled back into her basket and Kim migrated to one of the easy chairs, propping his feet on the ottoman.

"Are you going to bed or not?" Sally demanded.

"Not," Kim said. "Can't sleep just yet."

"Suit yourself." With that Sally wrapped herself in a quilt and rolled onto the fainting couch with her back to him and the baby's basket on the floor beside her. All he could see of her then was a cascade of brunette waves... but it was enough.

Eventually Kim fell asleep right where he was, not waking up during the two times Sally had to get up to feed the baby... or when she spread a blanket over him and stuffed a pillow under his head. Salviah Louise Whatleigh Lowenstein was just plumb et up with maternal instinct that night... and something else. She just didn't know what it was yet.


	17. Chapter 17

_CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—PART ONE_

 **THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE**

" _ **We learn geology the morning after the earthquake."**_ _(Ralph Waldo Emerson)_

 **Monday, October 3 (sunup)...** The women were already washed, dressed and had breakfast preps well underway before any of the men (not including the Koski brothers) even thought about waking up (but we'll cut 'em some slack for the time being on account of their various ailments). Though not exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (having tied on an especially good one the night before to calm their nerves) the Finns were already engaged in morning chores by the time the sun poked itself over the horizon.

The chickens were outed from their coop for the day and fed, eggs collected, the cow milked and all Andy's pets taken care of before the brothers stopped to attend to their morning meal. Earlier, Feets had dressed out those two raccoon casualties (the squirrel being too small to bother with) and set the quarters to soak in brine. Dried with a dish towel, dipped in egg yolk, rolled in flour and fried in bacon grease, they were a tasty alternative to bacon and a welcome change from rabbit. (Waste not, want not, their momma'd taught 'em!)

Kim and Jonesy both awoke to the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. Jonesy had slept well—better than he'd expected—whereas Kim had hardly slept at all due to adrenalin overload, unrelenting chest pain and sheer anxiety over the menace behind the curtain (he'd absolutely refused to utililize the bed and instead had returned to the chair). He ached all over and had a crick in his neck. It's a rare chair that any adult can sleep in comfortably. He knew he'd have to work hard today to keep his irritability under constraint.

Assured that the madman in the corner wasn't awake yet, Kim went behind the curtain to dress. He tried focusing his concentration on matters unrelated to himself—watching Jonesy folding his pajamas and inserting them under his pillow, for instance, and following suit thinking _'when in Rome...'_

 **Dedicated nightwear** was a relatively alien concept for Kim. Where he came from, people normally slept in the buff whereas these American men (as he'd learned) usually wore some item of clothing to bed... drawers (with or without vest) in hot months and woollies when it was cold. Seeing the women in their nightgowns last night had settled one troubling question, which was what did proper American ladies wear to bed? Apparently they wore flannel tents. In his few intimate interactions with AngloAmerican females so far, no sleeping had been involved and—with an eye to turnaround time being money and all—they dispensed with undergarments altogether and rarely disrobed completely.

Native women, as Kim had discovered with compliant maidens of that persuasion, customarily slept (and played) in their birthday suits as did the women of his own household. Idly he wondered how any AngloAmerican man—after battling his way through yards of fabric, ribbon and lace (not to mention all the buttons on his own nightgear)—had the energy to finish what he started. Cultural diversity could be such an entertaining subject. When Kim slithered out from behind the curtains, there was Sally in her overalls, sorting and folding laundry and not looking especially cheerful herself.

 **Slim and Jess had both** had restless nights before finally achieving deep-sleep states. They were still dead to the world—a wonder as Peach was creating an infernal racket getting set up for breakfast. Andy was just exiting his bedroom and, seeing that Jonesy and Kim were in day clothes, demanded the same privilege. He wandered over to inspect the baby sleeping peacefully in the basket.

"Well... is it a boy or a girl?" he queried.

"She's a precious little girl," Sally replied.

"When do her eyes open?" A perfectly legitimate question for a boy who'd never been that close to a human baby that young before, including last night.

"When she wakes up... and, believe me, you do NOT want to wake her up right now... get your butt in the bedroom and get dressed. You can help me fold sheets."

Miss Sally wasn't usually this cranky but Andy figured she'd been woke up too many times during the night—he certainly had been every time that baby cranked up the volume—so he forgave her tartness. He wondered if maybe the baby was deaf—how could anyone sleep with all that noise rolling out of the kitchen? "Okay, Miss Sally. Are we eatin' pretty soon? I'm real hungry. I didn't get no supper."

" ' _any'_ supper, Andrew... and I don't know. Go ask Peach."

"That's okay... I'll wait." Andy definitely wasn't up to messing with that little old Chinese lady who looked like she'd been beat with an ugly stick.

"Is your brother awake?" Emmaline asked, sitting at the parlor table and entering notations on her patient charts after making Kim and Jonesy stand in formation for a quick once-over.

"No, m'am. He sounds real bad, Miss Emma. Is he gonna be all right?"

"I certainly hope so, Andrew. We're doing everything we can to make him better as quickly as possible. Do try to be quiet and not bother him. He needs his rest."

"Quiet like a mouse, Miss Emma," Andy promised, tiptoeing into the bedroom and gently closing the door behind him.

"You two..." Emmaline flapped a free hand in the general direction of Jonesy and Kim. "Get your coffee and then get out of the way. Go out on the porch... the sun's up and it's warm enough. There's no place to sit in here. We'll call you in when breakfast is ready. We're running a little late this morning so it'll be a while." It was true... there wasn't a horizontal surface that didn't have a pile of folded or unfolded something or others on it, so the two did as directed. The piles that Sally had removed to the parlor table last night had been returned to the fainting couch.

 **Sally immediately interrupted** her labors to drag Jonesy's fireside rocker to the porch so they'd both have a comfortable place to sit. Right behind her was Emmaline with an armload of pillows. The two of them fussed all over the old man, getting pillows situated just so, making sure he had proper back and arm support. Jonesy grumbled but Kim could tell he was enjoying the attention. Kim wouldn't have minded some of that himself.

"Your help is appreciated, my dear... but you do have a business to run and a son who's no doubt missing you by now," Emmaline was saying.

Sally snorted. "Avery is perfectly capable of taking care of the business without me and Jacob adores being with his cousins—they probably haven't even noticed I'm not there. But I suppose I should at least check in... just so Jake won't forget he's got a momma."

"When are you leaving?"

"Sometime after lunch... I'm not in a hurry."

"When you get to town, ask around if there's anyone who'd be willing to wetnurse that baby... or take it back to its people where it belongs. We can't keep it here."

"Don't get your hopes up, Aunt Em. No white woman in her right mind's going to volunteer."

"She doesn't have to be white. Failing that, see if the mercantile has any nursing bottles in stock. If so, put a couple on my account and have them sent out here with whoever's coming. Oh... and I'll have a list for you of other things we need..." She and Sally went back inside and Kim could overhear Sally asking Andy for directions to storage areas for clean laundry.

Apparently it was not Sally's intention to pay him _any_ attention this morning, Kim thought bleakly, seeing as she hadn't so much as thrown him a glance. _And why should she? She has more important matters to attend to... not only here but at home, where she has to go_ sometime _... to her husband... and child._ Kim noted that Jonesy had brought a newspaper outside with him and was scrutinizing the classifieds with intensity, signaling a disinclination toward sociability. Perhaps he was disappointed that Kim hadn't fulfilled his prediction by conveniently expiring during the previous forty-eight hours.

(Jonesy wasn't being unsociable on purpose—he had his mind on other annoyances... notably, that he'd been banished from his own kitchen... _HIS_ kitchen, in which that bilious-natured troll was even now rearranging his pots and pans!)

 **Shifting his attention** to the horses grazing in the pasture, Kim endeavored to pinpoint exactly what was causing him such disquiet... aside from the obvious. As a youngster he'd received instruction in several different disciplines of meditation but had never seriously employed any of them... never had a need to until now, wasn't sure he could even remember how to go about it. He did recall there were certain prerequisites, like a comfortable position and a quiet private place... neither of which were available here. Maybe later in the day he'd take a little walk around, not too far, to see if there was some location not crawling with people... Kim gradually became aware that someone was speaking to him.

"Hi, Mister Lizard... or can I call you Kim? Miss Sally said that was your real name?" Andy had come out onto the porch and was settling himself cross-legged on the floor after a wary glance at Jonesy, who appeared to be snoozing with the newspaper covering his face and his hands clasped over his belly.

"Sorry... wasn't paying attention... you were saying?"

"I was just askin' what I should call you. I'm not botherin' you, am I?"

"No, of course not. Why do you ask?"

"On account of Nurse Emma... I mean Miss Emma... she said not to pester you 'cause you ain't feelin' well."

Kim grinned. "Is this where I'm supposed to say _'isn't'_ , not _'ain't'?_ "

"Not you, too!" The boy rolled his eyes, looking pained.

"It seems your brother wants you to use correct grammar and I wouldn't want to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. So... Miss Emma said...?" Kim prompted.

"I was just thinkin'... if I asked was I bothering you and you said no then it's okay for me to be talkin' to you, right? Is it okay if I ask questions?"

Sometimes children were a lot more logical than adults, with a keener perception unclouded by adult experience and expectations. Behind those bright hazel eyes Kim sensed a lively intellect and a thirst for knowledge... a kindred spirit.

" **Sure. You go right ahead** and ask all the questions you want. I'd welcome the distraction. Did you have questions?"

"Oh, yessir... lots of 'em. But..." Andy dipped his head and studied the floorboards.

"But _what_ ," Kim pressed. "What else did Miss Emma tell you not to do?" He was all too familiar with an adolescent's fascination with intrigue. And the easiest way to gain a kid's cooperation is draw him (or her) into a conspiracy.

"Miss Sally said not to talk about Indians... or halfbreeds."

"She did, did she? Wonder what brought that up?"

"Well... when I was askin' about if you could read and write 'cause if you could then maybe you could read to Jess instead of me when I hafta do chores and maybe that would help you get to be friends that way and then when Doctor Whatleigh said that probably wouldn't be a good idea I unnerstood it was on account a you bein' a halfbreed and all and Jess might accidently on purpose shoot you like he tried to do last night only Miss Emma took away his bullets..."

"Whoa! Hold up! Take a deep breath! Did Miss Sally say _why_ Jess would want to shoot me? He doesn't even _know_ me!"

Andy leaned forward, earnestly whispering, "Like I said, on account a you bein' a halfbreed and that bein' a kinda touchy subject with Slim and Jess 'cause they don't like 'em and Miss Sally said that may be true but still was a rude thing to say in front of you but she didn't tell me to 'pologize just that I shouldn't talk about it no more..."

"It's okay..." Kim interrupted. "I understand where they're coming from. I get that all the time... and it's just Kim, okay? Not mister anything. Kim's my real first name. What else did Miss Emma or Miss Sally say... or tell you _not_ to talk about? I promise I won't tell either of them what you've told me—a friend doesn't rat out a friend, right? As far as I'm concerned we're already friends and you're not responsible for how your brother or anyone else feels or whatever problem they have with me," Kim said gravely.

"You mean that?"

"Absolutely!"

Andy grinned. "Well... they didn't say anything else to _me_ but I overheard 'em talkin'... Miss Emma was tellin' Miss Sally that Jess thinks you're dangerous... I don't know why 'cause you ain't got no guns... but _she_ don't think you are..."

" **Do I seem dangerous to you, Andy?"**

"No... but you don't look much like no halfbreed neither... no offense! All the ones I ever seen got dark hair and brown eyes... I mean, your skin's browner than mine but the rest of you looks white... mostly. I got me some friends... one's half-white and half-Sioux but he looks real Injun, and this other friend's half-white and half-black and he's got hair like a black person only his skin's white as mine. And Mister Lychee... he's half-white and half-Chinese on account a Miss Peach is his momma but he looks mostly Chinese except his hair's reddish, not black. I don't understand how that happens."

"No offense taken. And you're in good company on the color issue. No one knows why mixed-parentage kids turn out looking more one way than another. I guess one of the reasons for the way we look is percentages."

"Huh?"

"See... your friends are fifty-fifty... fifty percent white and fifty percent colored. My color comes from my grandparents and parents... my dad's a fifty-fifty and my mom's twenty-five percent white and seventy-five percent colored. So what does that make me?"

"Uh... I dunno... I ain't too good with numbers."

"Don't you go to school?"

"Sure... just not right now on account a the school's closed."

Kim was thinking that a boy his age ought to be further along with his mathematics but decided not to say so. (He'd also been thinking about how he was going to get around whether or not he really was part Native American—because he strongly believed it was very wrong to lie to children. Substituting the term 'colored' was an acceptable alternative.)

"These numbers mean I'm sixty-two and one-half percent colored and only thirty-seven and one-half percent white. If those numbers were different, I'd look even more white... or more colored. I'd probably have dark hair and dark eyes, too. Make sense?"

"Wow. I never thought of it that way."

"But all those percentages are a mouthful so it's just easier to say 'halfbreed'. Next question?"

"What's the name of your tribe?"

"Oh... I claim Métis Makah." (Which wasn't _quite_ the same as saying ' _I am'_ —evasion by semantics!)

"I know about the Métis... they're mostly in Montana and Canada, right? Never heard a the other ones."

"Have you ever been up in Washington Territory? Or heard of the Olympic Peninsula?"

"I've never been anywhere but _here_ ," Andy said with disgust.

"The Olympic Peninsula is kinda like the state of Florida, which is also a peninsula... it's a big finger of land that sticks out from the mainland into the ocean. That's where the Makah live." Fortunately Andy didn't ask if he was _from_ there or he _would_ have had to lie about it.

"So can you?"

"Can I what?"

"Really read and write?"

"Yes, Andy... I can. I suppose it's all right if I call you Andy and not Andrew or Mister Sherman?"

"Slim's Mister Sherman... not me... oh... I guess I am except no one's ever called me that and I only get called Andrew when I'm in trouble."

 **The youngster had many** more questions but sensed his time was limited—breakfast would be announced any minute now and he might not get another chance for a one-on-one with their guest for quite a while. He'd been saving his most important inquiry for last—about that fascinating tattoo, of which so far he'd caught only a few tantalizing glimpses.

"Can I see your tattoo? I didn't get a real good look at it the other day..."

"Sure." Kim stood up, took his shirt off and turned around... waiting while Andy studied it for one long minute.

"Well… I guess it _could_ be a lizard with wings… but I don't think that's what it is."

"You don't? What _do_ you think it is, then?"

"Um… a dragon… maybe?"

"What would you know about dragons?" Kim was mildly surprised.

"At school when we were studying English history and the Middle Ages, Miss Brightwell had a picture book with lots of engravings and there were some dragons in it… not like yours, though…"

"You're absolutely right… that's what it is."

"But why is it there… on you? What does it mean?"

Sensible questions which Kim was anticipating... so how to explain it in simple terms?

"It's a symbol… it's there so other people will know, without having to ask, who my people are and what house... what clan... I belong to."

This was such a totally outrageous concept to Andy that he was flabbergasted. "You mean, like cows and horses get branded so everyone knows what ranch they belong to?"

"Well... yes... sort of. Think of it as just another form of permanent identification." Kim turned back to face the boy, almost hearing the gears whizzing.

 **Andy was indeed thinking** of what Slim had taught him about how, before the war, slave owners weren't above applying hot irons to their human chattel... and how even before that, in olden times, criminals were branded so everyone would know what they'd done. Once, in town with Jonesy on a Saturday morning market run, he'd seen a white woman with blue designs on her face. He'd stared openly until Jonesy had hustled him away, explaining that the lady had been captured by Indians when she was a little girl and held as a slave for many years, her face tattooed to indicate her status. That poor thing would wear those marks of shame for the rest of her life. So Andy didn't ask Kim outright if he'd been a slave or a criminal, instinctively knowing there were lines even his insatiable curiosity wasn't allowed to cross. Instead, he asked how it had been done.

When Kim detailed how pigment was introduced into the skin through punctures, Andy gulped in horror. "You let someone stick _needles_ in your back?! Didn't that _hurt?!_ "

"Yeah, sure did," Kim grinned, "but not half as bad as these broken ribs do!"

Andy was poised to ask how that long thin scar cutting right through the design had been acquired but any further discussion was curtailed by Peach stomping out to whang away at the triangle. Breakfast was being served.

Loitering just inside the door while folding towels on the fainting couch, Sally turned away with a head full of questions. She'd heard everything. It occurred to her that at no time had she been positioned with an unencumbered view of his back. Damn skippy she wanted to see that dragon!

 _CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—PART TWO_

 **EAST MEETS WEST**

" _ **There is no room for two dragons in one pond."**_ _(Chinese proverb)_

 **Right after lunch...** The Sherman ranch house was barely large enough to accommodate four people to begin with. Adding three more residents (four counting the baby) had made private discourse almost an impossibility... not that Andy and Kim had made a concerted effort to keep their voices down. It just didn't occur to them that any of the women, busy as they were doing women things, had the time or inclination to eavesdrop. But each of the three women in the house—being a Mother... complete with the invisible third eye at the back of the head that sees all and the hypersensitive owl-like ears that hear all—had overheard at least parts of the conversation on the porch. And the boys had, of course, underestimated a Mother's ability to immerse herself in some domestic task while still keeping track of each of her chicks.

Jonesy had taken Emmaline's advice and gone for a lie-down. Also at her direction, Andy had picked out a dandy Jules Verne adventure to read aloud to Jess. Slim had accepted a cup of chicken bouillon and a piece of toast but otherwise wanted to remain in bed and be left alone. Kim had made himself scarce after breakfast. When he hadn't turned up by lunchtime, Emmaline recalled having seen him parleying with Peach out by the clothesline. However, when cornered the small woman disavowed any knowledge of his whereabouts, saying only he had gone away to think and when he was done thinking he would return.

 **Emmaline fumed to her niece** somewhat later. "Where could that boy have gotten off to? If he hurts himself Freddy will be furious!"

Referring to the previous evening, Sally said, "Seems to me he's in more danger _in_ the house than _outside_ it!"

"Mister Harper and I have come to an understanding about that. He assures me there will be _no_ further incidents of that nature," Emmaline stated confidently.

"Wouldn't count on it, Auntie Em. I mean... Jess isn't any more prejudiced than any other man around here but it doesn't take much to set him off if he feels threatened."

"Men! Bah! If only they understood how much more quickly civilization would advance out here if they'd put more effort into cooperating with the indigenous population instead of suppressing it! If we women ran things..."

"But we don't... not yet, anyway. Heck, it's only been two months since Missus Swain was the first woman to cast a vote in the whole U.S. of A. That's something to be proud of!"

"We won't be seeing equal rights in our lifetime," Emmaline lamented.

"Probably not..." Sally agreed, "but that doesn't mean we should give up." She and her aunt were occupying the porch rockers with Peach perched on the bench between them and the baby parked in her basket at their feet. They called themselves enjoying a 'tea break' but were nonetheless gainfully employed with an assortment of mending. Close inspection had revealed that fully a third of the incoming laundry required darning, patching and/or installation of replacement buttons. The topic of conversation veered from women's rights to social reform to—invariably—men... specifically, the five males presently under their charge.

"You know, Matthew Sherman's as fine a gentleman as you're ever likely to encounter..." Emmaline began.

"Don't get on that hobbyhorse again, Em. I'm not looking to hogtie Slim Sherman."

"I don't see why not... he cares for you and Jacob needs a father..." Emmaline persisted, eyes narrowed. "Would you at least consider a proposal?"

"Throw another coin in the wishing well, 'cause that ain't happenin'. And we are _not_ having this discussion again!" (Because she and Slim'd already had it... several times... and were in agreement that marriage wasn't in the cards for them.)

"Of course, I can understand why you would find Jess Harper more... attractive..." Emmaline wasn't one to mince words.

"Aunt Em... don't _even_ go there! They're both attractive... but as different as apples and oranges. Now will you _please_ change the subject!"

Emmaline accepted defeat... for the time being... and moved on to what she and her niece had both overheard—in bits and pieces—of Kim's and Andy's earlier conversation.

"For a halfbreed Indian—if indeed he is one—our Kim is uncommonly wellspoken and I suspect quite well educated," Emmaline commented. "There's much more to him than meets the eye."

 **Peach gabbled a stream** of something and Sally looked up sharply.

"What did she say?" Emmaline'd had no trouble learning any of the romance languages at college but had never acquired a facility for Cantonese although she understood a few words here and there.

Brow furrowed, Sally said, "She says Kim isn't _hakgwei_... um... not a 'black ghost'."

"Whatever does she mean? Obviously he's not black! And tell her to speak English!"

Sally fired off something in Peach's squawky lingo and got an immediate and lengthy reply, during which the old woman never took her eyes off her work or dropped a stitch.

"She says she doesn't feel like it today and what she meant was a red man... an Indian. I guess there's no word in Cantonese for American Indian. She's saying he isn't one or even partly one..." Sally didn't include Peach's suggestion that her mistress should go and do something anatomically impossible.

"But... he _is_... he told Andy so himself!" Emmaline sputtered. "Are we to understand he's lied to us?"

"He wasn't speaking to _us_ , Auntie... he was addressing a child and he didn't specifically state he's part-Indian. His admission was to having antecedents of color... which could mean many other things besides Native American. Peach is of the opinion the color part is Chinese. Furthermore..."

"How can that be? He doesn't look anything at all like Lindsay," Emmaline huffed.

"Furthermore..." Sally continued smoothly, "She says Kim is Wood Dragon and you'd better handle him with greater care or he might turn on you... on us."

"What idiocy is this? Dragons indeed!

"I'm surprised that after thirty years with Peach you still don't understand the significance of Chinese astrology."

"Or any other kind of astrology... it's all nonsense."

Sally rolled her eyes. "Listen at your narrow-minded self! Shame on you... disparaging someone else's belief system!"

Emmaline glared at her housekeeper. "Did I not forbid you to fill the childrens' heads with that mumbo jumbo? Have you continued doing that despite my warnings?!"

Peach looked up from her stitching long enough to give her employer the fisheye.

"She's been doing that for thirty years, Aunt Em... a little late to be complaining about it now."

"And I'm neither narrow-minded nor disparaging! Haven't I always allowed her to maintain her Buddhist shrine in the house? It's that zodiac business I object to!"

Peach had abandoned her sewing. Making a monkey face at Emmaline, she turned to Sally and resumed her sing-songy narrative. Emmaline watched as her niece's face reflected surprise, confusion—occasionally she would insert a comment in English such as 'really?' and 'oh my!' Then she started laughing. When Peach stopped talking, Sally wiped her eyes and said, 'Well, that certainly explains a lot!"

"What's explained? What'd she say?" Emmaline demanded crossly, disgruntled at being left out.

"Oh... she's going on some more about dragons... nothing you want to hear," Sally said airily.

Emmaline hmmphed and admitted she _did_ want to hear.

"First of all... Kim isn't as young as I thought he was... I figured he was maybe eighteen, nineteen at most but he's twenty-six, same as Jess. They were even born on the same day!"

"No they weren't... I noted their birthdates on my patient charts. Why's that so funny?"

"It's a bit complicated... Peach figured it out. Kim's given his birthday as February 18, 1844. According to the Chinese lunar calendar this is the first day of the Year of the Wood Dragon and incidentally also under the astrological sign of the dragon. His actual birthdate by our reckoning—the Gregorian calendar—is April 5th, 1844... same day as Jess'. That makes Jess a Wood Dragon, too!"

 **Emmaline dropped her darning** and threw up her hands. "I've never heard such ridiculous drivel in all my life! Jess Harper is a poor white boy from Texas! How does Chinese mythology apply to someone not of their race?"

"The Chinese don't see it that way... they regard birth signs as universal truths. Peach is a little nervous about having two dragons under one roof."

"Not that I believe in that rot for a moment, but _why?_ "

"She says it could mean double luck or..."

"If you call being run over by a stagecoach lucky."

"There is that," Sally admitted. "But it could also mean double the adversity. Don't you see... it has to be more than just coincidence... they'll either become friends for life..."

"Good luck with that, then. It appears neither one wants anything to do with the other at the moment."

"... or become enemies and one will destroy the other." Sally sighed. "Peach says, white man or no, Jess has the heart of a dragon and a fire in the belly just like that other one... only Kim _knows_ his dragon. Jess doesn't, which would put him at a disadvantage except that his _qì_ is strong and Kim's is weak... at the moment."

"His _what?"_

"His... uh... life force... his spirit. Everyone has his own _qì_ but draws additional strength from the people around him. Jess draws from Slim, Andy and Jonesy but mostly from Andy. Kim has no one... at the moment."

Oriental metaphysics were not Emmaline's forte but she understood this well enough and felt oddly cheered by Peach's assessment, knowing that recovery from devastating illness or injury quite often depended as much on the patient's will to survive as on the technical skills of his physician.

"And Peach knows this _how?_ "

"She says she can see it... like an aura, I guess."

" _Aura_... right." Emmaline snorted. "And you believe this?"

"To a certain extent, yes."

"I didn't think Peach liked Jess very much, the way he's acted with her."

"Aw, Em... she understands he's just scared and angry is all... of the situation, not particularly of her. And for the record, he doesn't like me all that well, either. But he's learned to tolerate me and he'll get used to Peach after a while. Anyway... I suppose I should get going..."

 **Emmaline reached over** and took her niece's hand, speaking in an unexpectedly humble tone. "Sally... thank you for everything you've done... yesterday, today... my word, all that laundry! We couldn't have done without your help."

"I might be back tomorrow... or the next day. Depends on how things're going at home."

Sally got up, kissed her aunt on the cheek and sauntered toward the pasture to collect her mare.

Emmaline waited until her niece had saddled up and was gone from sight before she descended from the porch and strode purposefully toward the barn where Feets and Oxtoe were soaping harness. Both jumped to attention and whipped off their chapeaus, although Feets shrank visibly—still smarting from last evening's tirade.

"Have either of you seen Kim lately?"

"No, miss," Feets mumbled. "Nod sinz brekfuss... he come oud, szee cow punny, und vauk up rud." He pointed westward and nodded his head. "Doan loog szo guud, him." By which Emmaline generally understood the young man had stopped by the pasture to see after his pony then gone walkabout.

"Which one of you is the best tracker?"

"Roop bedder den uz," Oxtoe mumbled.

"Where is he?"

"H'iss fix fenz for... eh... _maito lehmän_?" Feets looked helplessly at his twin.

"Cow what gif milch. Fenz for dat cow. He fix."

"You mean the cow pasture... behind the barn?"

"Yah, miss... he dere."

Emmaline rolled her eyes and sailed off around the barn to roust out the third brother. After fifty years in this country, they couldn't speak any better English than that? In her opinion (which was all that counted, after all), if one intended to live here and become a citizen, one ought to at the very least learn the national tongue!

Roop was just tightening the last strand of wire on a replacement fence post when Emmaline caught up with him and dispatched him to hunt for her missing patient.


	18. Chapter 18

_CHAPTER EIGHTEEN—PART ONE_

 **A FIRE IN THE BELLY**

" _ **Draco dormiens nunquam titilandus" ("Never tickle a sleeping dragon")**_ _(J. K. Rowling)_

 **The missing patient was indeed hiding.** Had he been watching, from his position on the high bluff overlooking the ranch compound, screened by low-growing shrubs under an isolated grove of stunted cottonwood trees, Kim _would_ have seen Sally ride off and Emmaline's engagement with the Koskis. He _would_ have seen Roop trudging over to the pasture to catch up a mount, and got an inkling the man was being sent to look for him. And a few minutes after that, with Roop walking his horse slowly while he himself hung halfway out of the saddle while studying the roadbed and following the path Kim had taken, Kim _would_ have had no doubt Emmaline had sent Roop to bring him back. But Kim wasn't looking.

Other than the interlude with Andy before breakfast—which he'd actually enjoyed, it being the first normal conversation he'd had since breakfast with Mr. Hickman three days ago... if you wanted to call that normal—his blue funk had persisted. Had gotten worse. He needed time alone to think, to meditate. But in order to obtain that he had to slip away. What he'd done was trudge along the road, staying to the smoothest parts to avoid tripping in a rut. His objective had been this hilltop but there was no way to get up here directly, not in his condition—it would have involved climbing up a steep slope. Instead, he'd slowly worked his way along the rise of the road until he could cut back along a gentler incline. It had taken a long time, with many timeouts to catch his breath, but eventually he'd found a smooth-surfaced sun-warmed rock to sit on, with a generous view.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Kim had inadvertently happened on Andy's 'special place'—his retreat when his world was closing in and he needed privacy. Andy had, in fact, been sitting there on that very rock contemplating the universe as he knew it on the day Jess arrived... an initially unwelcome stranger.)_

 **Drenched in sweat** from the unaccustomed exertion, Kim had pulled off his boots and shirt and gingerly levered himself down to a grassy spot in the sunny lee of the rock. He couldn't quite manage the lotus position but got as close as he could and let his arms lay across his thighs, palms up to the sun. He chose a focal point on the far horizon and concentrated on emptying his mind of everything. The point of this exercise was to reintroduce, isolate and tackle one emotional problem at a time...

 _It wasn't the pain..._ he was getting sort of used to it and it wasn't the worst he'd ever experienced—that had been the _palang_ that laid open his back. But at the time he'd been so overcome with blind rage he hadn't even felt the wound until much later, when it was being sutured without anesthetic.

While acknowledging Western medicine was in many ways technologically advanced compared to the more holistic approaches of his native culture, he disagreed with this practice of isolating patients in dark confined spaces and feeding them bland tasteless pap. Sick people needed openness—sunlight and dancing breezes, not the stale exhalations of others. They needed fresh fruits and vegetables and mental stimulation. They needed the comforting nearness of loved ones who truly cared about them. Western medicine either didn't recognize or refused to acknowledge that a patient being cared for at home was more likely to thrive than one being attended by strangers in an impersonal hospital environment. But who here cared what his opinions were on the subject?

 _It wasn't shame..._ he didn't exactly hold the moral high ground here but truth to tell he couldn't summon up a shred of remorse. He'd done what he had to do. (No doubt the same justification that gunslinger in the ranchhouse below applied to wasting an individual!)

 _It wasn't anger..._ not at those who deserved it but mostly at himself for having lost control of himself and the situation, then panicking and running away instead of first examining other options.

 _It wasn't sorrow..._ for what he'd been forced to leave behind. No use wallowing in it. What was done was done and nothing would ever be the same again.

 _It wasn't resignation..._ sooner or later he'd have to pay for his own intemperate action. Everyone always did, one way or another.

 _It wasn't fear of death itself or what came after..._ he didn't really believe in the afterlife to which he often alluded in jest. When you were gone, that was it.

 _It wasn't fear of the future..._ even though right now it didn't look like he had much of one to look forward to anyway...

So what was left, then?

 _Incapacitation...?_ He was finding it difficult to accept that he was trapped here, that he couldn't just jump on his pony and ride away whenever it suited him. His rib cage was telling him that.

 _Comfort...?_ Nope, couldn't really gripe about that. He was sleeping warm, dry and comfortable under a solid roof, being fed well, being treated with civility (more or less). As long as he could keep himself hidden he was reasonably assured this state of affairs would continue until he was ready to move on.

 _Honesty...?_ There was a tough one! How to explain to the people of this house that his survival depended on his keeping on the move, just out of reach? How to get them to understand—without adding to the woes of this already beleaguered family—the possible dangers courted by his presence in their household? There was no guarantee that the people hunting him wouldn't indiscriminately or accidently injure anyone who came between them and their quarry. How much more could the doctor—or any of the others—guess and how much could be safely revealed without giving away the whole show?

 _Happiness...?_ No. He wasn't a damned bit happy about anything although he supposed he ought to be grateful he hadn't died alone in a bog, and for that he had no one to thank but the Goddess of Coincidence since he didn't believe in a higher power.

 _Alienation...?_ Yes. It rankled that he was being actively disliked for what he was, not anything he'd said or done—by at least two individuals, anyway. And since he was stuck with them for the time being, something would have to change... and he'd have to be the instrument. Kim promised himself that as soon as he returned to the ranch he was going to start working on making friends out of both those men. Of course, even if he dropped the Métis Makah pretense he'd _still_ be a halfbreed in their eyes and he didn't know if this dislike covered everyone of mixed race... or just those with Indian blood.

 _Loneliness...?_ Finally, Kim had arrived at the overwhelming reason for his distress.

 **He'd rarely been away** from people who loved and cared for him, except when he'd gone off to university, and even then he'd been surrounded by a coterie of cousins. Being cut off from his kin was a new and frightening experience on its own, not even considering being hunted like game. The Sherman family and assorted others _in situ_ were taking care of him, true, but they weren't _his_ people and it wasn't the same thing. It didn't engender the same contentment as being with your own folks, your own family.

Hand in hand with this was a distinct awareness of sensory deprivation from both a cultural and personal standpoint. His people were very tactile-oriented. Physical intimacies—hugs, kisses, touching the person with whom you were talking—weren't accepted social practices between unrelated adults here, whereas in the islands such gestures were freely given and accepted with no thought to sexual overtones. Kim wasn't thinking of the bought-and-paid-for kind of physical release that involved so little humanity... or even of the compliant Métis girls who regarded close encounters of that sort as recreation, to be mutually enjoyed by both parties only in the moment.

Which brought him to _that woman_... logically a dead-ended aspiration even if he had any... and the very last subject with which he should be concerned. Yet he couldn't _not_ think about her...

 **The next thing Kim knew,** Roop was gently shaking him awake, saying, "Meester Keem... vee go home now. Almose time zupper."

The sun had long since rolled to the other side of the boulder and was casting long lavender shadows across the land. Kim was chilled, his butt numb and limbs stiff and unyielding. The old man had to put his boots on for him, help him stand, help him with the shirt sleeves and buttons. Kim had to lean on Roop for balance as they made their way downslope to where the horse was tethered. When Roop offered to help him mount, he declined and said he'd walk back. The elder wasn't about to leave him on his own so the two ambled along the road together.

Kim was delivered to the front door at twilight, just as supper was being served. Emmaline, though plainly put out, withheld comment, as did Andy, wondering where his new friend had hidden all afternoon. Neither Jonesy nor Slim had even realized he'd been missing. Afterwards he napped on the fainting couch until Feets came in to announce the bathhouse was open for business. Andy was kind enough to go and get his pajamas from under his pillow so he wouldn't have to face the menace behind the curtain... tomorrow would be soon enough to embark on his friend-making mission.

The steam of the sauna and the hot water of the soaking tub went a long way toward erasing the annoyances of the day, and Kim was so fatigued by the time he returned indoors he only made it as far as the fainting couch. Emmaline had been hoping he'd recover sufficiently to take charge of that wretched nuisance of a baby, but when she saw that wasn't going to happen, she threw a blanket over him and left him as is. Kim slept solidly for the remainder of the evening and on until dawn.

 _CHAPTER EIGHTEEN—PART TWO_

 **OF LUST AND LOVE**

" _ **Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other.**_

 _ **Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it."**_ _(Judith Viorst)_

 **Tuesday, October 4 (mid-morning)...** Sally was just rounding the last curve in the road approaching Sherman's place when the stagecoach passed in a boiling cloud of dust on its way to town. She waved anyway and Mose waved back. Today she was driving her sister-in-law's surrey. Pearl would have delivered the supplies but as she had her hands full at the clinic and Sally was going that way anyway, Sally had volunteered. She would much rather have been on Tar Baby, but needs must.

When she got there, Emmaline was tending Slim. Peach was attempting to instruct Jonesy in the finer points of dim sum. The baby was slumbering in her basket. Andy was reading to Jess. Roop was fiddling around in the forge. Feets and Oxtoe were taking the newly-relieved team out to pasture. Kim was nowhere to be seen—to Sally's disappointment although she wasn't quite sure why. Everything was seemingly under control.

As Sally was unloading parcels and packages from the surrey, Emmaline collared her with a request forwarded from Slim... the Koskis were going to start bringing cattle in to fenced pasturage for the winter season and would she consider going with... today, at least? She knew the property well from all the times she and Slim had ridden out together and the Koski boys didn't. Plus, Alamo needed the exercise. Oh hell yeah... of course she'd be happy to do that! She went to tell Slim but Emmaline stopped her. He really didn't want her to see him in his present state... which she understood—she wouldn't have wanted her main squeeze to see her either if she was sick and feeling as bad as he apparently was.

Sally had reached the front door when it suddenly occurred to her that—although concerned for Slim's health—for the first time ever she wasn't experiencing the warm fuzzies she usually did whenever she was in his company or knew she'd be seeing him soon... and it wasn't because he was sick. Not that they'd ever been demonstrative in public... or even overly so in private. Theirs was a relationship of convenience more than anything else—undemanding, between two friends who knew each other well, were comfortable in their intimate moments, knew how to please each other... it was enough—had been enough for two years—but there was no passion there and they both recognized that.

 **Making her way** to the pasture with lead line in hand, Sally Lowenstein realized that what she _was_ feeling was something she hadn't felt since... well, since Jess Harper had arrived on the scene... but it wasn't Jess she was thinking of...

Sure, Slim was four years her junior but that didn't seem to matter much when they were together. She must be out of her mind... her body aching for someone she'd only just met and knew absolutely nothing about... and a scrawny little critter at that. Okay... short, maybe, but not so scrawny—he had a nice solid build, what she'd seen of it from the waist up. Of course, he couldn't compare to Slim Sherman in manly physique and he wasn't as devastatingly handsome as Jess Harper... but still...

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note:**_ _Said it before and I'll say it again... there just ain't no accountin' for chemistry!)_

 **Sally feared that she might be** coming down with the middle-age crazies to which some of her peers occasionally alluded... not that she had that many _proper_ women friends. Having been shunned most of her adult life by the respectably married ladies of the town (most of whom having had no romantic experiences outside the bonds of matrimony), Sally felt most comfortable exchanging girl talk in the company of her aunt's employees.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note:**_ _The Prairie Rose girls—some thirteen in all, ranging in age from seventeen to thirty-one—were several cuts above the average barroom floozies that populated Laramie's many other saloons and whorehouses. Each one had been selectively recruited by either Madam Aline or Madam Vidalia in larger cities at some distance, like Cheyenne or Denver. A PR girl had to be attractive, reasonably well educated, articulate, attentive to personal hygiene, possess a good sense of humor and—especially—enjoy her work. Consequently, whatever staffing turnover occurred was usually due a girl marrying out... and that was almost always to an older widowed gentleman in search of companionable arm candy.)_

 **What Sally hadn't learned** from Peach she'd learned from the PR gals. She liked them and they liked her, happily sharing their vast store of knowledge regarding men and how to handle them. They were also savvy about women and _their_ urges. They'd provided excellent advice on the logistics of managing a no-strings-attached affair, which is how Sally had conducted her relationship with the rather staid and straight-laced rancher for the past two years.

From her worldly aunt Sally had learned that it was just as natural for an older woman to admire an attractive young man with lust in her heart as it was for an older man to do the same with a pretty young woman. The difference being, of course, that it was socially acceptable for said older men to translate their urges into action but not the other way around. As it was generally known that Slim Sherman would eat dirt and worms before he'd solicit a non-professional female to sleep with him, Sally had found herself in the somewhat unbecoming position of having to proposition _him_ rather than waiting for him to make a move.

 **Sally recalled the first time** she'd ever seen Matthew Sherman, Junior—it was in May of 1856. Her daddy had just opened his practice in Laramie and Mary Sherman had been among his first patients. Sally was enjoying her last summer with her family—in the fall she would be matriculating at Salem College in far away North Carolina. Old Doc (before he became known as such) had gotten word that it was Missus Sherman's 'time' and Sally had driven out to the Sherman ranch with her father that day. It was a difficult labor for the already past-forty rancher's wife and they'd ended up having to stay all day. Mister Sherman had pressed his teenage son into entertaining the doctor's daughter for the duration, taking her riding around the spread and showing her the sights. He was amazingly literate for a home-schooled boy and had impeccable manners.

Seventeen-year-old Sally was frankly enthralled with the fourteen-year-old Matt (he hadn't yet earned the nickname 'Slim'), as tall and gawky as herself. He had eyes the color of wild prairie flax, white-blonde hair and a ready smile that lit up his dimpled cheeks unblemished by acne. It was easy to see the Adonis he'd become when he got his full growth. They'd had a wonderful day, throughout which he treated her as if she were a princess... instead of the oversized, boisterous and not particularly attractive tomboy she knew herself to be. At dusk they returned to the ranch, where they were greeted by the squalls of Matt's new brother, Andrew.

When Sally had returned home four years later, liberal arts degree in hand and a teaching position already secured, it was to find Slim Sherman had indeed fulfilled his earlier promise—breathtakingly handsome and oh so unattainable... every girl in the territory had set her cap for him. Sally and her fellow wallflowers didn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

 **Then the war came along** and disrupted everyone's lives. Slim enlisted, and then Jake. In the years that followed, Sally—now a mother and fictional widow—maintained close ties with the elder Lowensteins although the promised conversion never came about. Under Abraham Lowenstein's tutelage, she progressed from apprentice farrier and metal artisan to journeyman and finally master craftsman. Then Abe and Sarah had perished in an influenza epidemic, leaving the business and all their worldly goods to their 'daughter-in-law' and grandson.

When Slim Sherman finally returned home for good after the war and a year of 'mobile readjustment', he and Sally had renewed their friendship, finding they had many interests in common. It was in fact Slim who'd brought Avery Jackson to her with the suggestion the man would make an able assistant and manager for the livery stable. The South Carolinian had been in charge of his master's racing stables back in Charleston, where Lieutenant Sherman and his company had been quartered in the rice planter's sumptuous antebellum mansion. Slim had met the newly-freed slave and recognized his expertise as a master blacksmith and farrier.

When a year later Sally had expressed the need for a competent stable manager and assistant blacksmith, civilian Slim had sent for the man and she'd hired him. Slim's motive wasn't entirely altruistic. He'd just contracted with the stage line to provide relay station services, which meant he'd be responsible for on-the-spot mechanical repairs to coaches and shoe replacement for twelve to sixteen company-owned horses on his premises... in addition to his own growing complement of stock horses. He hoped that with Avery's assistance, Sally would have more free time to start teaching him basic smithing and shoeing. Sally was delighted to help—at twelve miles away the Sherman ranch was outside any business competition zone—and, of course, they'd be keeping close company at least one or two days a week for quite a while...

Oddly enough, their physical relationship had not begun there in the enforced closeness of the forge in Laramie but in a hotel in Cheyenne, where they'd unexpectedly blundered into each other while enjoying a romantic weekend getaway with their respective temporary paramours of the moment. When Slim had shown up at the workshop the next weekday, they'd both burst out laughing at the awkwardness of the earlier encounter.

"Instead of _you and her_ and _him and me_ , that could have been _us_..." She hadn't meant to say that—it just slipped out.

Slim had stopped laughing, giving her an odd look. She'd held her breath—it was one of those make-it or break-it moments that could profoundly affect their friendship...

"In fact," she'd continued cautiously, "maybe it _should_ be you and me... I think I'd like that... very much..."

"I think I would, too..." he'd replied with equal candor.

 **That was two years ago.** Before the first kiss was exchanged, however, they'd arrived at some understandings—first and foremost being that neither was seeking a more formal union. So far it had proven a satisfactory arrangement that accommodated both their needs without placing unwanted, unneeded restraints on either of their lives... or presenting unnecessary complications.

These were the thoughts bouncing around in Sally's head as she led Alamo back to the barn to saddle up. She intuited that Kim had far more than just a passing interest in her but what she couldn't figure out was _why_... she wasn't young and she wasn't shapely in a wasp-waisted trim-ankled sort of way. True, she wasn't homely as a mud fence but neither was she uncommonly beautiful. What did he see in her? What, for that matter, did she see in him?

Another question over which Sally pondered was why this new feeling was so different from her fondness for Slim and her secret infatuation with that rogue gunman Jess Harper (secret from him, anyway... and Slim), which _was_ down and out sexual desire... no two ways about it! The Prairie Rose girls knew all about this because every single one of them shared it. They all knew who Jess was but none of them had ever had the honor of giving him a tumble... although they all wanted to. That was the downside of employment in a high-class establishment that didn't cater to 'his kind'—both madams frowned on fraternization with the lower orders outside of the workplace.

The biggest question, however, was what in the world was Sally Whatleigh Lowenstein going to do about all this? As it happened, the last person she wanted to face right now was already in the barn, hand-feeding chunks of carrot to an exceptionally ill-favored pony she assumed must be his. Good thing it wasn't part of a matched team—a dealer would literally have to go to the ends of the earth to find one that even came close. Kim's face paled when he looked up and saw her coming in.

 **In her boots** Sally was a good four or five inches taller than Kim in no shoes at all. Today she was back in her favorite overalls and chambray shirt with the missing buttons (which no doubt had simply popped off out of sheer fatigue). Which put Kim's eyeballs at roughly the same level they'd been Sunday morning... and he was hard pressed to not stare at that heavenly valley. Now that an opportunity to speak with her in private had arrived, he found himself inexplicably tongue-tied. Having to look up didn't help... especially when she was looking down at his bare feet in disapproval.

There was a moment of embarrassment when Sally lifted Slim's big saddle off the rack—a gentleman would have offered to saddle a lady's horse for her... and there was no way he could do it. He hoped she remembered why. She seemed to read his thoughts, though. "Don't worry about it... I don't want you hurting yourself any more than you already are."

At least he could manage the bridle; the gelding obligingly held his head still enough... and low enough. Looking up sideways at Sally, Kim wanted to say "I was hoping you'd come" but that sounded too pathetic. He amended it to "Going somewhere?" _Gah! How lame was that?!_

"Just going for a ride with the Koskis, see if we can scare a cow or two out of the gullies."

"Wish I could go with you." He sounded wistful. "Are you staying tonight?"

"Wasn't planning on it. Might come for the weekend, though. Aunt Em'll be needing someone to spell her for a while so she can check on her own business."

"Business?"

"She runs a brothel in town." Said with complete nonchalance, as if the lady in question maintained a millinery shop or headed an orphanage. (Emmaline did in fact contribute heavily to the county orphanage and sat on the board of directors.)

How does one respond to that sort of bold admission? One does not. One changes the subject.

 **"So..." Kim began tentatively,** "You and Slim...?"

"It's not what you think..." Sally said defensively.

"I wasn't thinking anything," Kim averred.

"Actually... it _is_ what you think... but it's not serious. And anyway, it's not any of your business."

"I couldn't agree with you more," Kim agreed.

"We're just friends... very good friends," Sally asserted.

"I'm happy for both of them... I mean both of you."

"Are you making fun of me?"

"Absolutely not, no. He's a fortunate son."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering about... um... _Missus_ Sherman...?"

"There is no Missus Sherman. Matthew's single."

"I thought his name was Slim."

"That's what everyone calls him but his real name's Matthew. I like that better. I should go... the boys are waiting on me..."

Kim wasn't ready to lose Sally's company so soon. He segued to the next question that leapt to mind. "So... uh... you're a blacksmith?"

"I am. What of it?"

"Just asking. Sort of an unusual occupation for a gir... a lady..." Which was exactly the wrong thing to say to this particular female... and not the first time she'd encountered that opinion.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Sally had not enjoyed the advantages of being properly 'finished'... that is, she'd had very little schooling in the feminine arts. To her way of thinking no man had the right to judge what she could or could not do just because she lacked the appropriate appendage. For anyone to even suggest that her occupation made her less of a woman... those were were fightin' words!)_

 **Rolling up her sleeves** to her elbows, Sally held both hands out, palms down and fingers splayed out. "Look at these hands and tell me what you see..." she demanded. Her muscular forearms were dark-tanned and cobwebbed with cicatrices, some big and some small, some old and others fairly recent. Most looked like they'd been made by burns. Her hands were knobby and big-veined and she was missing part of the little finger on the right one. The nails were clipped short, split and ragged and rimed with ground-in grime that no amount of scrubbing could remove. Although her hands were clean, the skin looked rough and callused. He already knew her strength.

Kim could have responded in any number of ways but at that moment that unfortunate tendency to express exactly what he felt took hold of him without mercy. A rebuttal formulated itself in his mind with crystal clarity. He knew what he was going to say and how he was going to phrase it. He couldn't stop himself.

He reached over to take her hands, turning them up so that his thumbs rested lightly in the center of her palms. "I see the hands of a woman who's secure in her own identity and not governed by conceit or vanity. I see hands that are gentle enough to calm an infant and smooth away a man's worries. I see hands that are strong enough to temper a wild country and forge it into a civilized nation, with or without a man alongside. I see hands I'd be proud to hold if they belonged to the woman I loved..."

When Sally said nothing as the seconds ticked by, Kim finally looked up to find her inspecting him as if she'd discovered some new and fascinating specie of insect.

"I'm sorry. Was that too personal?" he said softly.

She lowered her eyes to study her hands as though they were alien objects not connected to her body.

"Way too personal." She paused for a moment. "Where the hell did _that_ come from?"

"You asked me what I see. That's what I see... in my mind. I'm truly sorry if it offended you in some way."

"Offended? Oh no... not at all... I just wasn't expecting... that."

This time it was Sally who changed the subject, withdrawing her hands slowly. This was getting too deep, too fast. "Before I go, can I see it?"

"See... what?"

"Your lizard."

"Excuse me? My... _what?_ "

"Your thingie... you know..." she said impatiently.

Kim was speechless.

"I'm guessing it's a tattoo? On your back? Couldn't help but overhear..."

"Oh... _that_..." he squeaked.

"What did you think I meant?"

"Um... sure... why not..." Kim unbuttoned his shirt and drew it off, turning his back to her. Sally examined it thoughtfully, finally extending a forefinger and delicately tracing the image downwards, giving him goosebumps and making the short hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

"Interesting," she murmured. "Will you tell me about it later... another time?"

The finger left his back and he turned around, putting his shirt back on but leaving it unbuttoned. That she seemed be confident there would be another time was the most encouragement he'd gotten all morning.

"I have to go."

Sally swung into the saddle and took the reins. Then she shocked the hell out of him by leaning far down and stroking his cheek. For a brief, terrifying moment he thought she was going to kiss him... on the forehead. But she didn't.

"See ya when I get back." The spell was broken.

 **Kim watched her** until she disappeared around a bend in the road behind Feets and Roop, his spine and face still tingling from her touch. The rest of him was a little jellylegged as well. Exiting the barn, he floated on his fantasy cloud toward the pasture to turn Scooter loose, and then to the house. The cloud evaporated in a poof and he fell back to earth as he spied Jonesy and Emmaline occupying the porch with curious and somewhat disapproving expressions. He'd neglected to rebutton his shirt and the bruises—softening around the edges from eggplant purple to violet and primrose—were on full display. He and Sally had been out of sight in the barn for little more than ten minutes but he could well imagine what the older couple were thinking. Before any indelicate questions could be posed or awkward excuses offered, however, Peach padded onto the porch and announced lunch.


	19. Chapter 19

_CHAPTER NINETEEN—PART ONE_

 **LOST BOYS**

" _ **The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."**_ _(Don Marquis)_

 **After lunch...** "Mind if I join you?" Emmaline came outside with a cup of coffee and sat on the bench between the two rockers. Kim started to get up and offer his seat. Jonesy occupied the other one. "No thank you, I'm fine where I am."

Kim sat back down, waiting for her to speak. It seemed clear she had something to say. Unfortunately, he wasn't in much of a mood to hear it. The euphoria of the barn encounter had worn off. Going out there in the first place hadn't been a great idea... as his ribs were letting him know. And he had a headache.

"I'll get right to the point. It would be helpful to know a little more about you as you're going to be here for some time."

"Not that long," Kim countered. "I'll be on my way soon's I can ride."

"Which won't be soon, according to the doctor. May I ask you a few questions?"

"You may _ask_..." Kim said.

"You don't mind speaking in front of Mr. Jones, do you?"

Jonesy continued rocking, eyes closed against the morning sun but not dozing. "Don't mind me... I just live here."

"My point precisely. These people are our friends and neighbors, Kim... we're concerned for their welfare. To a degree, I understand your reluctance to disclose personal information but I have to advise you, your subterfuge isn't holding water... your attempt to disguise yourself as a native, that is..."

"It was good enough for whatsisname back there. He could've killed me."

"Ah... Jess... well... yes, could have and likely would have had I not removed the bullets from his pistol. Mister Harper and I had a discussion about that. He's very sorry for what happened... but you must understand, it wasn't personal. His reaction was in keeping with the way we must live here on the frontier if we wish to survive. I do hope you can put aside any personal animosity and accept his apology."

"Gee, I feel a whole lot better now, hearing how sorry he is."

"No need for snideness. We should all try to put this business behind us in the interest of harmony over the next few weeks. Besides..." A ghost of a smile flittered about her lips. "I made him promise he would make every effort to avoid shooting you in the future."

"That's tremendously reassuring," Kim said sourly.

"Would you at least tell us your real name? 'Sky Lizard'—while amusingly quaint—is hardly appropriate as you're obviously no more a native savage than myself or Mister Jones."

Kim shrugged. "Appropriate or not, that's what the Métis call me... _Lézard du Ciel_."

"Lizard of the sky," Emmaline interpreted for Jonesy, but to Kim... _"Probablement en référence à ce design fascinant sur le dos?"_

Oooh... she was a sneaky one, trying to catch him out like that!

" _Oui exactement,"_ he flipped back. (It wasn't a lizard but he wasn't disposed to explanations on any subject at this point unless they were flowing in _his_ direction for a change.)

"Although you may have _lived_ among them, young man, that doesn't make you one of them," Emmaline stated, "Any more than my speaking French makes me a Frenchwoman or your facility with Cantonese makes you Chinese."

"What makes you think I'm not what I say I am?"

"Most people would accept that... but my nephew does not. He's worked at hospitals in the Chinatown districts of both San Francisco and Honolulu."

"Good for him. What's that got to do with me?"

"Fred—Doctor Whatleigh—has extensive experience with multiracial issues... particularly with criminal elements in both cities. He fears that—in view of your ethnicity, or ethnicities, which you must admit are somewhat of a rarity in these parts—you may have some connection to those elements, perhaps in a mercenary capacity?"

Mercenary? _Mercenary?_ _Where did that come from?_ In Kim's head, an illusory portcullis slammed down, an imaginary drawbridge cranked up, fictive archers rushed to man arrow slits. Behind these mental ramparts, all sorts of emotions were battling for supremacy—surprise, anger, defensiveness, panic. It was a real struggle to suppress them. _What the hell do they think I am?"_

Emmaline continued. "I don't necessarily share this assessment. Nonetheless, I imagine inquiries will be made. You should be aware of that."

Jonesy had stopped rocking and was paying very close attention now, his eyes locked on Kim's face, searching for a reaction and finding nothing but an impassive façade.

"Profiling an individual based solely on appearance is more than a little unfair, don't you think?" Kim queried mildly.

"There _were_ other factors. And our world is neither fair nor safe. No one ever promised it would be. The price of survival is ongoing vigilance. As they say, forewarned is forearmed." Emmaline hadn't meant to be so forthright but—too late—it was done.

Kim looked away for the longest time. How could _inquiries_ be made when they knew nothing about him? Inquiries by whom? To whom?

"You don't know anything about me so good luck with that."

"Doctor Whatleigh's wife is Chinese—full-blood. You may have seen her Sunday... she was driving the surrey. Her father is... shall we say... a gentleman of wealth and influence... a mover and a shaker, if you will. My nephew will be asking him to look into the matter. Mister Wing has contacts and resources that stretch from here to San Francisco to Honolulu to Hong Kong and far beyond that. If there's any information to be gleaned or a tale to be told, his people will get it..."

"Oh, there's a story, all right," Kim admitted with no change in expression, "but all you need to know is that I got into some trouble back home and had to leave town in a hurry."

"That's what they all say," Jonesy sniffed.

"Why not tell us, then? Surely it can't be all that bad."

"You have no idea." With that Kim set his cup on the floor, stood up and stepped off the porch—not carefully enough and stumbling but making a quick recovery and stalking away.

" **Well. That was a bit rude!"** Emmaline exclaimed.

"You deserved it, Em. I don't know what all this's about... Fred didn't say anything about it the other night... but you came on like judge and jury both... first insinuating he's lying and then practically accusing him of being a criminal."

Emmaline made to stand up to go after Kim but Jonesy grabbed her wrist. "Let him go, Em. You can't win 'em all. They're young, they make bad decisions, they get into trouble. Then they run instead of owning up to whatever they've done. Just like Jess... only _him_ , we _can_ save because we understand what we're up against. What did Freddy tell you, anyway?"

Emmaline gave him a synopsis of her nephew's suspicions. "What if he's right, Jeb?"

"And what if he isn't? You may've kicked over an anthill for no good reason, Emmaline. Plus Fred's going to be upset you said something when he asked you not to."

"If you need an answer, the fastest way to get it is to ask the question, I've always found," Emmaline asserted. "In any case, I don't believe either of these young men are truly bad characters... I sense no evil in either one."

"I tend to agree, Em..." Jonesy slid his fingers down to intertwine with hers. "Jess's had bad breaks that pushed him over to the dark side... he's got a troubled soul but a kind heart big as all outdoors. And he's smart—just lacking in education."

"There's no denying Jess Harper possesses a capacity for violence and a very short fuse... but he displays his volatile nature openly..." Emmaline reflected. "Whereas this other one..." She gave an involuntary shiver, suddenly understanding what Peach had meant about the hidden dragon. "There's a certain stillness in his manner that puts me in mind of a dormant volcano... there's a fire down below but you'll never see it until the day it erupts. It's not healthy to keep that much rage bottled up inside..."

"Whatever he did—or whatever happened to him—it's not our business, Emmaline. Jess hardly ever talks about his past and we're careful not to ask him. It's best that way."

" _Someone_ has to care about these lost boys, Jeb..." Emmaline declared, her hand still in Jonesy's. Suddenly, he chortled and squeezed it.

"Durn if you aren't turning into a mother hen in your old age!" he exclaimed. "Never thought I'd see the day when Madam Aline went mellow!"

"Hush!" she chided. "Do you want Andy to hear you? And talk about the pot calling the kettle black, you old biddy... the way you fuss over those three boys of yours as if they were baby chicks!"

"Someone has to."

"Isn't that what I just said?!"

 **Kim hadn't meant** to walk away like that without excusing himself as good manners required—he would have to go back and apologize. Miss Emma's inquisition had caught him off guard but also explained the doctor's chilly attitude on Sunday morning—the man couldn't be faulted for having made logical if erroneous assumptions based on physical evidence, or for his subsequent clumsy attempts to elicit information. Neither could Kim hold against Miss Emma her somewhat indirect if equally misguided approach. He decided this must be yet another one of those sociocultural oddities he kept blundering into on American soil.

Where he came from, it was customary to make certain inquiries of strangers: What's your name? Who are your people? Where do you come from? Where are you going? Why are you here? Showing sincere interest in your guest's bona fides was simply proper etiquette. Here, such questions were considered not only rude but dangerously nosy. Now that he thought about it, Kim realized that even during his time with the Métis, not one person had ever asked him a direct personal question and he hadn't volunteered any information about himself that would explain who he was or lead back to where he'd come from. On the trail, the few times his presence had been questioned—usually by an officer of the law, _'Just passing through'_ seemed to be a satisfactory response.

There was absolutely no doubt in Kim's mind that he was being hunted, but up until now he'd had a decent chance of throwing the hunters off the scent. Miss Emma's concerns were valid in that his presence could possibly constitute a threat to the welfare of decent people who were only trying to help him... but 'inquiries' would only draw attention. So he had two choices here: Tell everything and trust they'd understand how he came to be in such dire straits... or continue to say nothing and hope that ignorance was bliss.

 **Too preoccupied with his thoughts** to pay much notice to where his bare feet were taking him, Kim was startled to find himself back in the cool darkness of the empty barn... a good place to take an afternoon kip away from the clamor of the house. The stall farthest back in the corner proved to be where the furniture removed from the parlor had been temporarily stored and tented with a tarpaulin. Yes... his old friend the lumpy horsehair sofa was there and would serve nicely after the broody hen who'd appropriated it was evicted. A couple of folded saddleblankets would do for a pillow. It took a bit of shifting to achieve a comfortable position and he soon drifted off, concealed beneath the tarp.

Kim gradually awakened to the sounds of horses being brought in and unsaddled and the voices of the Koski brothers intermixed with Sally's. He had no idea what time it was but he was too weary to move. Gradually the noises subsided until the only ones left were the grinding of molars on oats. He fell asleep again.

The next time he woke up the only thing he heard was his stomach growling—the horses had been turned out to pasture for the night. Summoning up the energy to get up off the sofa (and driven by the need to attend to a call of nature), he stepped outside the barn and looked around. The house was dark and still and so was the Koskis' camp. The Morgans and the surrey were gone—Sally had gone back to town. Even though she'd said she was going, Kim felt unaccountably discouraged by that... and the fact that no one had bothered to come looking for him in time for supper—an indication that his welfare just wasn't that important.

Easing into the parlor and feeling sorry for himself, Kim rolled up in the blanket left on the fainting couch... no way was he going behind that curtain! Having napped away the entire afternoon he didn't think he'd be able to get to sleep, but...

 _CHAPTER NINETEEN—PART TWO_

 **THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM**

" _ **We have met the enemy and he is us..."**_ _(Walt Kelly's Pogo)_

 **Morning...** Kim was roused from the arms of Morpheus by cooking smells, accompanied by Peach's usual din, and voices coming from the kitchen. First slipping outside to take care of business, he came in and rounded the corner to find Emmaline and Jonesy having coffee at the kitchen table. As they both bid him an agreeable good morning, he vowed to overlook yesterday's unpleasantness and act as if nothing were amiss. Peach served an outstanding breakfast—fried ham with redeye gravy, scrambled eggs, savory corn bread from the oven. Kim knew he'd never be able to keep down anything that heavy, limiting himself to two slices of toast with a scraping of butter and jam.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Getting Peach to learn occidental cooking had taken years off Emmaline's life, she reckoned, but the end result was worth it. She often claimed that as a girl she couldn't boil water—an exaggeration, of course. Nowadays she could not only boil water but produce an edible repast if she absolutely positively had to and was in the right mood. Same could be said for Sally.)_

 **It seemed to Kim** that Miss Emma was making an effort to atone for yesterday. It was shaping up to be another balmy day, she said, suggesting he and Jonesy get themselves situated on the front porch before she woke up the other three males for their breakfast. She even set up the side porch with a basin of hot water, towels and shaving gear for their morning ablutions, and had Peach drag Jonesy's rocker outside. Kim didn't relish the idea of inhabiting the clothes he'd slept in but even less the thought of venturing behind the curtain to get fresh ones. He'd just make do.

Before leaving the kitchen Kim respectfully inquired of Peach—in Cantonese but remembering not to bow—if 'Little Auntie' had anything he could help her with. Yes, as a matter of fact, she did... on a trip out to the facility yesterday she'd discovered Jonesy's vegetable patch behind the house. She'd spaded up a mess of potatoes and picked an apronful of pole beans. He could make himself useful peeling and snapping.

Then Emmaline asked if he'd be so kind as to mind the baby, who'd already been changed and fed (by Peach, of course, not herself) and was cooing in her basket. Yes, of course... he'd be happy to. Yesterday's excursion had taken a tremendous toll and he figured today he'd be better off doing nothing more strenuous than sitting and rocking.

Soon he was joined by Jonesy and his basket of rapidly diminishing holey socks along with Emmaline's sewing basket containing an assortment of women's dainties. When Kim couldn't help snickering the older man sniffed. "Well, why not? If you can peel taters and play baby nurse, I reckon I can play seamstress and deal with ladies' fripperies!" He had a point there.

Once they were settled, Kim engaged Jonesy in conversation about the history of the ranch and how Jonesy himself had come to live out west. A born storyteller, Jonesy was soon off and running. Periodically Emmaline would stick her head out the door to see if they needed more coffee or anything else, causing Jonesy to mutter uneasily that this uncharacteristically benign behavior on her part was making him nervous. " _Nurse Emma's_ just itchin' to get out..." Kim had no idea what this meant but didn't ask.

Kim had thought he and Jonesy might get bored as the morning wore on but there were enough _divertissements_ to keep them occupied...

 **As designated personal assistant** to Jess that day and on his way inside to discharge his duty, Oxtoe lingered to bring Jonesy up to date on yesterday's preliminary cattle roundup. Slim was still incommunicado and he felt obligated to report to _somebody_. Then Andy came out to jaw for a while until being summoned to take up his assignment, which was finding alternate means of entertaining Jess, who was growing restive in his confinement... and increasingly vocal about it. Other than that, all was relatively peaceful in the Sherman stronghold for the nonce.

The four horses selected for the morning stage were brought into the corral from the pasture, shoes inspected and harnessed up with a half hour to kill before being called into service. The ten o'clock stage came and went without fanfare and only one hardy passenger, as all other prospective travelers had been scared off by news of the measles epidemic raging in Laramie.

Feets and Oxtoe fell to industriously soaping and oiling harness leathers before being interrupted by Peach marching out into the yard. With chopping and plucking gestures she pointed out three adolescent roosters she judged as being prime for the pot and indicated she wanted this undertaken immediately if not sooner.

Roop escaped only because he was out of sight at the time, leisurely enthroned in the outhouse with back issues of the _Sentinel_ , preparatory to setting out on a tracking mission—that damned cow had yet again vanished from her enclosure. He caught Andy taking a time-out to check on his menagerie and asked which horse he could borrow. He beamed with pleasure when told Slim surely wouldn't mind his using Alamo and gaily thumbed his nose at the chickenpluckers as he loped off.

Lunchtime arrived. Peach slapped together an enormous platter of door-stop ham-and-cheese sandwiches with homemade mayonnaise and mustard and sides of sour pickles and sliced tomatoes and onions—enough for everyone including the Koskis, with some set aside for the absent Roop. Slim got chicken broth. Kim picked at his food.

 **Jonesy and Kim resumed** their stations on the porch, carrying on intermittent conversation as they peeled, darned, snapped and stitched with the baby-laden basket parked on the bench between the two rockers. They weren't working very diligently and Jonesy kept dropping off. At one point Peach came out to chitter at Kim in Cantonese that she'd appreciate it if he'd get a fornicating move on as she'd like those fornicating potatoes peeled in time to start fornicating supper.

"What'd she say?" Jonesy asked.

"She said we're having cockaleekie soup and green beans for dinner."

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Not being much into foreign culinary experiences and unfamiliar with that hearty Scottish concoction of chicken, leeks and barley—or, in this case, onions and potatoes—Jonesy was unsure that he was willing to tuck into something that sounded like a social disease. Good thing Peach was unacquainted with that British delicacy known as 'spotted dick'.)_

 **Feets stopped to visit,** on his way to the kitchen with the gutted chicken carcasses for presentation and inspection. Then he rejoined his brother in sorting feathers as directed into three separate baskets according to future needs: wing and tail for dusters, medium-size for mattress ticking, and pinfeathers for pillows.

The porch-dwellers were lulled into a false sense of serenity as the next few hours passed with a susurrus of blended sounds in the background... Peach's buzzing in the kitchen, bed-imprisoned Jess' intermittent complaints, Andy's indistinct responses, Slim's muffled coughs from behind the closed bedroom door, Jonesy's puttery snores between fits of wakefulness. Kim got up only to change the baby or feed her, as needed. He'd brought a book outside on the chance he'd get to do a little reading, but every time he thought he was done with veggies Pearl brought him a basket or bowl of something else... peas needing shelling, more beans needing snapping, late season corn needing shucking, onions and garlic to be braided into ropes...

 **In the meantime...** Emmaline had been concentrating her attentions on Slim's worsening condition. He still had laryngitis and a fever and his head congestion had migrated down to his chest, producing a pronounced wheeze and a barking cough. Her own version of topical decongestant (petroleum jelly mixed with eucalyptus oil) applied to his chest and the bowls of medicinal vapors under the improvised respiratory therapy tent were helping but required refreshing and reheating every hour (another reason she'd not slept soundly during the night). There was no question of trying to introduce any solid food—his throat was too sore from coughing fits. Despite Slim's feeble efforts to fend her off she was adamant about hydration with as much chicken and beef bouillon and water as she could force him to accept.

Emmaline was wondering when someone— _anyone_... but hopefully her nephew the physician—would show up with news of what was happening back in town. Wouldn't it be helpful if emerging technology came up with some way of installing telegraphy machines in private homes, so that people could communicate more swiftly than a horse could travel? By midafternoon _Miss Emma_ was in dire need of a lie-down or at least a sit-down—she wasn't a young woman after all and her stamina not what it used to be. However, _Nurse Emma_ was lurking just beneath the surface with a full head of steam, stealthily waiting for an opportunity to take over the helm...

 **The morning that had held** such promise of a glorious day had gradually given way to a leaden sky and an increasingly still and sultry afternoon as the earlier breeze withered and died altogether. With Peach's cookstove going like a blast furnace—loaves in the oven and chicken bubbling in the stew pot—the interior of the house had grown uncomfortably warm. Slim's bedroom was stifling and humid, which didn't make any difference to the sick man but convinced a flushed and perspiring Emmaline to take a siesta before she collapsed with heat prostration. She advised Peach she was going to their room for a lie-down and to wake her up in an hour.

Peach took advantage of the respite to rest her bones at the kitchen table with her feet propped up. There she perused a month-old edition of Sacramento's _Chinese Daily News_ while enjoying a cup of lapsang souchong liberally infused with the remainder of the Honorable Yee Sang's fine cognac (knowing the doctor had plenty more where that came from, carefully hidden from his wife). From time to time she shuffled outside to fling orders at whichever Koski was to hand, at one point intercepting Oxtoe on his trek to the half-moon palace by handing over a pail of reeking diapers and pointing at the washboiler on its tripod. He would much rather have remained with his brother Feets, passing a jug of corn squeezin's back and forth while sorting feathers in the shade of the cottonwood tree. Roop was still out joyriding in the hinterlands, searching for that cow.

 **The afternoon rolled on...** Soon it was time to prep the next quartet of steeds for the afternoon stage. Oxtoe had just finished pegging out newly-laundered nappies in time to assist his brother. While they were doing that, Roop showed up with the cow and some bad news...

 _(_ _ **Nonie's commentary on the Koski brothers...**_ _Them Koskis was good ole boys with hearts of gold but they wasn't exactly the sharpest pushpins on the corkboard, 'specially when it come to connectin' the dots. Roop was the only one what seen that raggedyass Injun squaw carryin' a basket down the road long 'bout sundown on Sunday night. But since it was only the one and a gal young 'un at that he didn't pay her no never mind when she come walkin' back from the direction of the house_ without _the basket. The next mornin' when he heard 'bout that Injun bub what was left on the porch, he still didn't have an_ aha! _moment. Wasn't 'til_ this _mornin'—when he come across that body floatin' in the lake—that he put two and two together.)_

 **Feets and Oxtoe listened** to Roop's story with dismay and the three of them immediately went into a huddle to cogitate on a course of action. How did she get there and did it matter? Not really—dead was dead. Why would she have deposited her baby on the doorstep of white folks and did it matter? Not really—although she must've had good reason. Shouldn't they notify someone of the death? Why bother? It wasn't like she was a white woman or anything. Ultimately they determined to keep this information to themselves—the folks in the Big House had all the trouble they could handle without dragging the Indian agent into it. Roop was dispatched back out to the lake with a shovel to do what needed to be done.

The denizens of the Sherman Ranch and Relay Station, while marginally aware of ominous thunderheads looming in the far distance beyond the mountains, were totally oblivious to the stormclouds gathering intensity under their own roof...


	20. Chapter 20

_CHAPTER TWENTY—PART ONE_

 **HOUSE CALL**

" _ **An optimist is a man who has never had much experience. A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists."**_ _(Don Marquis)_

 **About the time** the stagecoach was rocking in from the east, the Amish buggy was rolling in from the west and the twain met in what passed for a courtyard. Doctor Whatleigh alit from his vehicle and approached the porch, juggling his black bag, numerous parcels and another medicine chest.

Jonesy was reattaching a bit of fancywork to a petticoat spread across his lap. Kim was shirtless once more as the baby had spit up on him earlier. He had her against a now towel-protected shoulder, attempting to pat out the last burp. Young Doc paused on the step, having been already apprised by his sister of the past two nights' events. "Howdy, boys! How's the back today, Jonesy? Any improvement?"

"Much better, thanks... you were right about the pillows. Feeling kind of old and useless, though... looks like I'm not going to be worth my pay around here in the future, if I can't do my share of the work..."

"We'll have a talk about that later, okay? I heard Emmaline's got her precious bathhouse set up. A long soak with bath salts in the hot tub will do wonders for you. You should give it a try." Young Doc recommended, turning to Kim. "How about you, young fella? Feeling any better?"

"Fine as frog hair, Doc," Kim replied, deadpan. "I'll be back to robbing banks and felonious assaults in no time. Got anyone you want bumped off? I'm your man!"

"Er..." Young Doc didn't know how to respond to that, inching toward the door and wondering in annoyance who'd tattled on him. "Emmaline inside?"

"Having a lie-down, last I heard," Jonesy said, "I'd tread lightly was I you... _Nurse Emma_ the Impaler's long overdue."

"Thanks for the heads-up. How's Jess doing?"

"Tolerable, up to today. But right now he wouldn't be happy if he had his nuts in a solid gold vise."

"I suspected as much. I've brought you some more cognac, by the way... for medicinal purposes only, of course."

"Of course..."

"How's Andy holding up?"

"That young 'un's a brave soul, all I can say... considerin' Em's put him in charge of keepin' Jess busy."

"And Slim?"

"Not good at all. Emmaline's worried."

Young Doc sighed. "I was afraid of that. Well... let me see to the others and then I'll want to examine that infant," he muttered, fleeing through the door.

"She isn't going anywhere," Kim called after him.

 **Although used to his aunt's** take-charge and git-'er-done organizational skills, Young Doc was amazed at the thoroughness of the dwelling's do-over into command post/mess hall/field hospital—and at the dignified atmosphere that prevailed indoors. He ducked into the kitchen to give his surrogate mother a hug and a peck on each cheek, which she happily returned before shuffling off to rouse her mistress from her overlong nap. (Peach had 'forgot' to wake her up in one hour, taking into account sleeping dogs, etc.)

While waiting for his aunt to make herself presentable, Young Doc looked in on Jess, feeling badly at the man's forlorn countenance. When he wasn't asleep, the young Texan had the metabolism of a hummingbird. Even when he appeared to be relaxed, there was always some kind of movement in evidence. The first few times Young Doc had attended Jess he'd regarded all these mannerisms as a fascinating hotbed of neurological syndromes—benign fasciculation, focal neuromyotonia, facial myokymia, involuntary finger flexion. In time he'd come to understand that this was just Jess being his natural self... coiled tight as a watchspring with a near-hyperkinetic constitution that demanded constant motion. Young Doc had often wondered how Jess had managed to endure months of incarceration during the war and later in civilian detention and still maintain his sanity.

Young Doc inspected Jess' toes and used a broomstraw to check sensitivity and reflexes above and below the cast, then tested the solidity of the cast with a thumbnail, announcing that by the following day the embargo could be lifted and Jess could graduate to the wheelchair. Even that failed to perk up his patients's flagging spirits.

"You said seventy-two hours... that's up this afternoon... why can't I get the wheelchair today?" Jess groaned. "I'm goin' stir-crazy here, Doc!"

"Jess... a little more patience, please? Three days are what the instructions advise but it just doesn't seem quite solid enough yet... otherwise, looking good. Very good indeed."

 **Further exchange was interrupted** by Andy coming into the partitioned nook, where Young Doc commiserated with him over his uncomfortable condition and the unfairness of being the only one so afflicted in the household—everyone else evidently having already had measles or cowpox or they'd be showing symptoms by now. The rash had descended all the way to between the boy's toes. Young Doc assured Andy he'd be mostly over it in a week's time. "Try taking a cold shower a couple of times a day... that'll help with the itch, along with the calamine."

"Yes sir..."

"Now, you might experience some _other_ symptoms... here... I've made out a list for you. Doesn't mean you'll get _all_ of them... but you'll probably get _some_ of them. These are all very common so I don't want you worry about it if, for instance, your eyes get gummy and bright light bothers you. If you feel like you're coming down with anything on this list, you tell Miss Emma and she'll tell you the best thing to do about it, okay?"

"Okay."

"Think positive, Andy... in town people are _dying_ of this stuff... that's not going to happen to you! And you're doing real good helping with... well... you remember what we talked about?"

"Yes sir..."

Emmaline emerged from the 'nurses' station' in time to hear most of this exchange. Young Doc quickly scanned her face for a sign of _Nurse Emma_ , counting himself lucky not to find one. Even after a lifetime of living with the different faces of his personality-challenged aunt, he still found the transitions disconcerting.

Together they entered the second sickroom, where Slim was lucid enough to communicate some concerns through croaks and gestures. Was the stock being looked after? Were stage operations going forward? Were Jess, Jonesy and Andy all right? They gave him a brief update which seemed to satisfy him. Next, miming reading and writing, he wanted reassurance that someone was riding herd on Andy to make sure the boy was keeping up his studies. Emmaline asserted she'd take care of that as well.

The respiratory therapy was working as well as could be expected and Young Doc had brought along some different medicines to try... Winslow's Soothing Syrup (basically codeine in suspension) and powdered quinine. He further suggested that in a few days—if Slim felt up to it—daily sauna sessions might be helpful. Other than that, continued bedrest and as much sleep and fluid intake as he could stand. Young Doc admitted that he couldn't do any better than what Emmaline had been doing, so advised his patient to go along with whatever _Nurse Emma_ recommended. Yes, Slim looked and sounded awful, but as he was young and fit to begin with he'd likely be over the worst of it by the end of the following week. There was no reason not to expect a full recovery after a month or so.

 **Young Doc and Emmaline** moved to the kitchen where Peach had a fresh pot of coffee waiting. They spoke in low tones that couldn't be overheard by Jess and Andy around the corner.

"You're being far too open-handed with that boy," Emmaline fretted. "He should be confined to bed and kept as quiet as possible in a darkened room! I just don't understand this psychological approach to modern medicine."

"He's thirteen, Em..." sighed the doctor. "Naturally he's going to resist anything he's _told_ to do. This way— _my_ way—he has to take responsibility and make his own decisions when to ask for help. It's been my observation that just having an illusion of control, of having choices, contributes greatly to a patient's willingness to cooperate. So let's try it my way for a while, please? Don't force directives on him... let _him_ come to _yo_ u for advice if he starts feeling too badly."

"In my opinion, nephew, the child is too ill to have to deal with the responsibilities you've already imposed on him... other than his assigned schoolwork, that is. What you've asked of him will bring him even more closely under the influence of Jess Harper and deepen his attachment to a... to a..."

"I thought you liked Jess?"

"I do, I do... but you must admit he's hardly a healthy role model for..."

"At the moment a singularly unhealthy one, Aunt Emmaline... which is part of my devious plot to help Andy understand that his hero is not a demi-god with a fast gun... just an ordinary man who hurts just like anyone else, who needs a little help from his friends from time to time... just like everyone else. I'm looking on it as a prime character-building opportunity for a youngster who could use a little shot of self-confidence."

Emmaline sniffed but elected to drop the subject, turning instead to the previous days' unfortunate exchange with the guest patient. Young Doc shook his head. "I sure wish you hadn't done that but it can't be helped. I'll have a talk with him before I leave. All that aside, how are you coping, Em? You look tired. I don't want you wearing yourself out. Sally's offered to come out here and stay over the weekend. I suggest you take her up on it."

"What about Jacob?"

"All the cousins are under lockdown over at the Wings, being spoiled rotten by Grandma Willow... so far none have been infected."

"We could certainly use Sally's help... but we're already packed in here like tinned sardines!"

"Last time I looked, there were two bunk beds and a cot on the other side of the partition in Slim and Jess' bedroom... what's wrong with moving Andy to one of those. Then Sally could sleep in the bed next to Slim where she can keep an eye on him."

"Wilfred Whatleigh! What will people think?!" Emmaline pretended to be scandalized.

"Since when did you or Sally ever care what people think, Aunt Em?"

"There is that..." Emmaline admitted, narrowing her eyes in thought. "I doubt _he'd_ mind!" she said with a sly grin.

"Now Emmaline..." the doctor gently chided his aunt, "we're not supposed to know about _that!_ They'd be mortified if they knew we knew..."

"How're things in town, truthfully? When you didn't return yesterday I feared the worst..."

 **Young Doc ran a hand** over his tired face. "Truthfully? It's pandemonium... this is our first official census year, you know... seems like at least half of the two thousand people in Albany County have flooded Laramie, which barely has the infrastructure to support the eight hundred already living there. They'd have been safer had they just stayed in their homes. Half the population's ill, the other half's looking after them, and another half's drinking the saloons dry. Apparently they think insobriety fends off plague. There's been some looting and the jail's full. School's closed. The undertaker's overwhelmed. Many businesses closed..."

"I presume that includes the Rose?"

"You presume right... none of your young ladies are ill but there's no business. Vidalia's a real trooper, though... she's opened up the ground floor to hospital space for out-of-towners too sick to move and no other place to stay. All your girls've been pressed into service as nurses. The hotels and rooming houses are all full-up with volunteer medics and nurses pouring in from other towns... a lot of them are being put up in private homes."

"What's happening at the clinic... how's Pearl keeping up?"

"She's detailed four of her sisters to take over orphaned infants... a dozen so far and more coming, I'm afraid. They're staying at our place in the kid's rooms—the sisters, not the babies. Willow wasn't too happy about that but Lee overrode her. His contribution is opening up the laundry free to medical professionals."

"Perhaps I should go in... at least for a day or two..."

"No... stay here, please, Aunt Em... old people are the most at risk next to new mothers and anyone else whose health's already been compromised..."

" _Old people?_ " Emmaline snorted. "Who are you calling old? For your information my health is not in the least compromised and I've had the measles so I'm not susceptible. And even if I were, I would have already been exposed thanks to Andy..."

Young Doc threw up his hands. "Okay, okay... you've got me there... the truth of the matter is, you wouldn't have any place to sleep."

"Say _what?!_ "

"Well... it's like this... you know that Carmelite convent in Cheyenne—Little Sisters of Perpetual Desolation? They sent up a squad of nursing nuns—sixteen altogether—and we had to put them up _somewhere_... so I let them have your house."

"You _WHAT?!_ " Emmaline nearly fainted, thinking of her closets full of Madam Aline finery—not exactly dignified streetwear—and the two fey gentlemen occupying the third floor apartment.

Young Doc laughed. "You look like you just swallowed a centipede. Don't worry... they're nonjudgmental and very discreet. They know about Lychee and Lucky _and_ the Prairie Rose... I don't know _how_ they know but they do... and they think my brothers are utterly charming. Sister Misericordia is over at the Rose instructing your girls in nursing procedures. The head penguin—Mother Mary Appassionata—she shamed Irish Lily O'Hanlon into turning her establishment into a women's sanatorium for all the other sick working girls!"

"Good Lord!" Emmaline breathed.

"I'm on the emergency town council along with all the other doctors. We're doing all we can to get it under control. That's about all I can tell you at this point."

" **Did you have a chance** to talk with Mister Wing about that... _other_ business?"

"I did, yes... he's going to look into it. In the meantime, it's important we restrict knowledge of Kim's presence as closely as possible. If anyone asks, he's a halfbreed Indian just like he says. You needn't go into details. Would you pass the word around? "

"I'll do that... and shall look forward to hearing about whatever Lee finds out. One more item, Freddy... this unfortunate infant... can't you take it with you and slot it in with the others? I really don't need the aggravation!"

"Em... I'll bet you haven't fed that child one time... or changed her nappies or even cuddled her, so what do you have to complain about? Besides... she's being very well cared for here as far as I can tell, and getting much more personal attention than she'd be able to get at the clinic."

"But..." Emmaline sputtered, "she _cries!_ "

"Yes, dear... that's what babies tend to do. And I have another reason for wanting to leave her here..."

"What possible reason could that be?"

"Patient therapy."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"That young man out there... after seeing the care he takes with that infant... I'm beginning to believe I was all wrong about him. You leave him in charge of that baby and you won't have any trouble out of him."

"If you say so," Emmaline grumped.

"Furthermore... sooner or later he and Jess will have to arrive at a truce. With any luck they might even become friends, and wherever Kim is he'll have that infant with him. It occurs to me that having a baby around might help keep Jess calmed down. Maybe that's just a notion, but I've seen many a case-hardened hombre brought to his knees and turned to pudding by a tiny little baby."

Emmaline had one last, desperate objection. "Isn't she at risk from exposure to Andrew?"

"Of course... has been for days now... so if she's already infected, removing her elsewhere won't do a damned bit of good. The baby stays, Em."

Finally, it was time to return to the front porch... and Young Doc wasn't looking forward to it. Although Emmaline was confident her nephew was more than capable of putting a positive spin on her diplomatic faux pas, she followed him out to lend moral support.

 **Jonesy had fallen asleep** with the petticoat over his face to shield it from the sun—every snore caused it to flutter outwards. Kim had been ruing his earlier outburst—it wouldn't do to aggravate the doctor and be accidently poked in a sensitive area by one of those massive fingers—though he'd been unable to banish the persistent gloom that had clouded his senses since yesterday.

For his part, Young Doc had decided a cool, impartial professional demeanor was in order. "Emmaline and Sally both have told me what happened the other night... were there any aftereffects? Any nausea, dizziness?"

"No sir. Just a whole lot of hurt when I hit the floor. Blacked out and couldn't catch my breath for a minute or two."

"Emmaline give you any laudanum today?"

"No sir."

"Is the pain worse today than yesterday?"

"I'm trying not to think about it."

"I did warn you about protecting those ribs..."

"With all due respect, I didn't try to shoot myself in the back."

Young Doc couldn't help but chuckle. "Try to not do it again. And don't hold back on pain medication if you really need it. Now... let's see those bruises... hmnnn... well... they're starting to fade, that's good. If they weren't, deep-tissue damage would be a concern."

"Feels pretty damned deep to me."

"I'm sure it does... and will for a long time yet. But if you're strong enough to tote that baby around, then you're probably going to be just fine... again, in time. Just continue taking it easy."

"Whatever..."

"Speaking of which... let's have a look at her..." Young Doc lifted the sleeping infant from the basket and laid her in Kim's lap so he could unwrap and inspect her. That she was sound of limb, clean and well-fed, free from rash of any nature and—most of all—still alive was nothing short of a miracle.

"Sally mentioned you have experience with children..." Young Doc commented glibly, detecting in Kim's eye a fleeting glimmer of something... sadness? regret?

"Some," Kim said, looking away, not always successful at concealing his emotions.

"She's one lucky girl, then... we've lost quite a few babies in the last two days, back in town. A lot of mothers, too. We're going to have to move our orphanage to a bigger facility. Problem with this little one, though, is that we only accept white babies. Some of us are trying to change that... Emmaline, especially. She sits on the board but has been outvoted by narrow-minded bigots every time it comes up..." Young Doc shook his head in scorn, forgetting to whom he spoke and realizing too late he'd just opened a door to the very subject he'd been hoping to avoid.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY—PART TWO_

 **TAG TEAM**

" _ **Despite what they tell you, there are simply no moral absolutes in a complex world."**_ _(Berkeley Breathed)_

 **Kim walked** right through it, abandoning his intention to make nice. "You say that like you think yourself open-minded and anti-discriminatory... yet you were quick enough to believe that just because I'm colored and don't look like you I must be trouble."

"It wasn't like that... I had other reasons to..."

"Yeah, that's what _she_ said..." Kim interrupted, glancing at Emmaline. "But 'other reasons' don't give you the right to pass judgment on me. You don't know anything about me. If you had a specific concern, you could have just asked."

"Would you have told the truth?"

"Maybe, maybe not... but you should have asked first. At least given me the opportunity to either defend myself or decline to answer. Pardon me if I've got this wrong, but isn't this highly-vaunted American legal system of yours based on 'innocent until proven guilty'? I didn't come here looking for trouble and I haven't done anything to any of you. I don't understand your problem with me."

The baby must have sensed Kim's discomfiture—she woke up and started whining. Kim hurriedly wrapped her back up and jiggled her in his arms until her eyelids descended. While the doctor fumbled for a response to this unexpected display of eloquence, Emmaline spoke up.

"He's right, Freddy... one should never judge a book by its cover... you... we... should have known better than that." She even managed to sound just the tiniest bit remorseful. Addressing Kim, she said. "I apologize on behalf of both of us for that unintended offense. However... I stand by what I said earlier, about our need to protect ourselves... especially in light of your earlier admittance to wrong-doing..."

"No m'am... that's _not_ what I said. What I said was, I got _into_ trouble... that doesn't mean I _caused_ it."

"Well... did you?"

"No, m'am. I didn't start it but I damned sure finished it. Excuse my language."

"It isn't finished if the authorities are searching for you."

"I didn't say that, either. As far as I know, they aren't. It's... other people. The kind of people the doctor here's got his drawers in a wad about... that his 'inquiries' are going to lead straight to this house... eventually. That's why I have to move on as soon as I can."

"Why can't you tell us who they are and why they want you..." Emmaline persisted.

"Like I said... my business, my problem... not yours."

"Keep your secret if you must, but putting that aside for the moment, I'd like to tell you something about your wardmate with the broken leg."

" **I've already heard all I care** to hear about Quick-Draw Harper... believe me, I don't want any part of him."

Emmaline chose to let slide that rather impertinent remark. "When Mister Harper arrived here some months ago, no one knew _him_ but everyone knew of his regrettable reputation as a professional killer..."

Young Doc butted in. "Now, Em... Jess isn't..."

"A rose by any other name, Freddy..." Emmaline rebuked. "He is what he is. At one time he even had a price on his head, although he was later exonerated. He hadn't done anything to anyone around here, either... yet people were frightened of him... still are, and defensive. Excluding military service, Mister Harper has killed many times over, Kim—this is common knowledge..."

"Em, he doesn't... he's changed... he's _retired_..."

Emmaline gave him The Raised Eyebrow. "Oh really? According to the newspaper he's dispatched quite a few souls since his arrival... hardly a week goes by that he doesn't manage to find _someone_ to shoot. And _I'm_ speaking, Freddy, if you don't mind."

Young Doc couldn't resist an additional comment in defense of his friend. "It's not like Jess is proud of that reputation, Emmaline... he doesn't brag about it... in fact, he'd rather not talk about it at all."

"Although my nephew claims Mister Harper is no longer actively engaged in his previous occupation, former associates or adversaries keep coming around seeking revenge on his person for some past misunderstanding or perceived misdeed... with depressing regularity, I might add. Very few of them walk away. If anyone—including you—displays aggression toward himself or any of his family or friends, he _will_ fight back... he will hurt or even _kill_ you. Jess Harper is a good man, but... make no mistake... still a lethal one."

"I'll definitely keep that in mind."

"Don't be flippant, young man!"

"Not to be rude, Miss Emma... but what's your point?"

"Yes, Emmaline... what _is_ your point? Are you trying to scare Kim into running away?"

"Of course not... just the opposite, in fact, if you'd both please be quiet and let me finish!" Her commanding tone had the desired effect.

"While Mister Harper is capable of defending himself, he now has many friends willing and able to stand beside him... to protect him if need be. Matthew Sherman is his staunchest defender but not the only one. My _point_ is that unless you are or become _morally_ guilty of a crime of violence, you will be protected as long as you remain in this household."

" _Morally_ guilty as opposed to actually pulling the trigger? Who makes that call?"

"Society makes the laws, the laws are enforced by appointed officials, and juries drawn from that society rule on the rightness or wrongness of each individual case. Our legal system isn't perfect but it's what we've got. If any credentialed officer with a valid warrant comes looking for you, we would be obliged to hand you over. Anyone else will be discouraged, one way or another, from interfering with you or harming you. We could just about guarantee that _if_ we were aware of the direction from which any threat may be coming... and in what form. That's all I wanted to say. Please give it some thought."

"I will."

Young Doc broke in. "I wouldn't be too free with the guarantees, Em... after all, Jess doesn't always walk away either... he's collected more lead in the past five months than anyone else I know of."

"And you're accusing _me_ of employing scare tactics?!"

With an expression as bland as oatmeal, Kim looked from one of the bickering pair to the other. As much as he wanted to believe their assurances he was feeling weary and not at all well. He'd blatantly lied to the doctor earlier, having been faintly nauseous all day. There'd been some dizzy spells as well, though not bad enough that he worried about dropping the baby. And now lightheadedness and headache with coruscating flashes in his peripheral vision. What he really wanted was to lock himself away in a dark room and sleep until it was all over with... one way or another.

 **Just then Andy stepped** out onto the porch for some fresh air and to stretch his legs. Jonesy woke up and unwound himself from the rocker, announcing his intention to pay an extended visit to the privy and hobbling around the corner. Emmaline and Young Doc eyed each other, both silently acknowledging their failure to assuage Kim's fear and resentment but not knowing what else to say.

"Freddy, will you stay for dinner?"

"Wish I could, Em... but I need to get on back and I've got two more stops to make." Young Doc already had his black bag in hand.

Aunt and nephew took their leave of each other and the Amish buggy trundled away. Needing a word with Oxtoe regarding après-supper bathhouse use, Emmaline walked over to the gypsy wagon where he was preparing the Koskis' evening repast.


	21. Chapter 21

_CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE—PART ONE_

 **WHOMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE**

" _ **It's not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit."**_ _(J.R.R. Tolkien)_

 **Later that evening...** In the bathhouse, Kim was lingering in the hot tub while describing the properties of _kumis_ to Feets and Oxtoe in the sauna on the other side of the canvas partition. They opined it sounded pretty foul but were willing to give it a go if any could be found—which would be unlikely as fermented mare's milk wasn't a popular import item. He was beginning to believe the Finnish national motto must be _'If you distill it, we will drink it.'_

Kim had been putting off the inevitable confrontation with Jess Harper, conveniently finding no reason whatsoever to have to enter that portion of the room until he needed his pajamas... and then he'd ask Andy to go in there to fetch them. Should've done that before going for his bath but had forgot...

In the ranch house, Roop and Peach occupied facing armchairs on either side of the fireplace, their feet sharing an ottoman with the baby's basket within easy reach of the former _amah_. Feets still being in bad odor with Emmaline, the youngest Koski had been appointed that evening's minder. Neither he nor Peach understood a word of the other's speech but that was of no consequence... needleworkers of the world share a common bond. Somehow she'd communicated to him the need for winter baby apparel. Roop was clicking out a second pair of crocheted booties while Peach embroidered floral designs on the first pair. His next production would be a thick woollen bootie big enough to fit over Jess' casted foot.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _In that frontier era, with a majority population of bachelor males and a corresponding dearth of domesticated womenfolk, men could and did teach themselves to sew, knit and/or crochet... whatever it took to keep their clothing from falling to pieces and the naughty bits decently covered until they had the wherewithal and could get to a mercantile for replacement clothing.)_

 **In his quiet corner** Jess was reading from a selection of Andy's penny dreadfuls, occasionally snickering out loud or hooting over the triumphs of white-hatted square-jawed heroes versus black-hatted mustachioed badmen as conceived by some greenhorn city dude who'd probably never ventured beyond the enclave of Manhattan.

At the parlor table, Andy was hunching over his arithmetic textbook though his mind was elsewhere. After spending the entire day finding different ways to distract his bed-bound buddy, Miss Emma's summons to attend to his schoolwork had come as an almost welcome relief to both himself and Jess. After all, you can play only so many games of checkers, tic-tac-toe and hangman. You can read aloud only so many hours until your voice goes all croaky and your eyes start watering, even when they aren't already squinchy and sore from the measles.

Earlier, when Jess had snoozed off, the checkerboard balanced on his lap had tilted slightly. Andy had got down on his hands and knees to retrieve the pieces that had spilled to the floor. Reaching under the adjacent bed to capture one of the disks, his hand encountered the throwing knife Kim had dropped Sunday night. Andy sure enough didn't want Jess seeing _that_ thing again—mindful of the commotion it had stirred up the first time—so, not knowing what else to do with it he'd thrust it under the blanket on Kim's bed. Now he was worrying that maybe he should've hidden it elsewhere, or given it to Miss Emma...

 **Emmaline and Jonesy** had just come in from a walk and were divesting themselves of their outerwear when _Nurse Emma_ abruptly surfaced. "Roopertii, please escort Mister Jones and Master Andrew out to the bathhouse after they've assembled their nightwear and bath things."

Both prospective bathers immediately protested. They hadn't done anything to get dirty! They didn't _need_ baths! Nurse Emma informed them otherwise. "Unless we are very much mistaken no customary Saturday night ablutions were performed in this household. One need not possess a keen olfactory sense to detect a pervasive odor of unwashed bodies. Going forward, everyone domiciled under this roof will bathe at least every other day—excluding Mister Harper and Mr. Sherman for the time being."

"How on earth are you going to get Jess in the tub, Emmaline?" Jonesy challenged. _Hah... got 'er there, by jiminy!_

"We are confident of arriving at a solution. Andrew... you will scrub and rinse thoroughly with soap and tepid water, but no immersion in the hot tub until your rash has dried up. Roopertii, make sure they both wash their hair. Peach and I bathed yesterday so we will not be requiring use of the bathhouse this evening. Take your time, gentlemen, and do a proper job of it. Off you go then!"

"Yah, miss!" Roop snapped to attention and practically saluted.

"Aw, Miss Emma!" Andy wailed.

"Dammit, Emmaline!" Jonesy complained.

But off they went... because one didn't disobey Nurse Emma.

 **Behind the curtain,** Jess had hurriedly extinguished the oil lamp parked on the commode chair as soon as he understood Nurse Emma was now on the scene. Feigning sleep, he hoped to avoid her attention. Peach had hurriedly decamped to the kitchen with the baby, also hoping to avoid Nurse Emma's barkfest by looking busy. She needed to warm up some formula anyway.

Nurse Emma was glaring around for the next victim on whom to vent her spleen when she was distracted by Slim's calling for her from the bedroom. Her mood lightened when she found him not only awake and alert but having regained his voice, hoarse though it was. His fever was slowly abating as well. At his insistence on being brought up to date, _Nurse Emma_ temporarily gave way to _Miss Emma_ who took a seat on the adjacent bed and prepared to embark on what promised to be a lengthy discussion.

 **In the meanwhile...** Roop shepherded his two glum-faced sacrificial goats into the bathhouse, where Kim was obliged to relinquish the hot tub to the next incumbent. After checking to make sure the coast was clear of women, Feets and Oxtoe darted outside in the altogether to bring in buckets of water from the washboiler to replenish the tub. Despite its spacious structure, the bath pavilion wasn't meant to accommodate six naked bodies simultaneously, so Kim put on his clothes and departed.

Finding the parlor deserted, he migrated to the kitchen where Peach was filling the two new store-bought nursing bottles Doc had brought from town—stoppered with cork through which long thin flexible tubes ended in rubber nipples. (Seeing no need for all that extra tubing, Peach had chopped them down so that the nipples were closer to the bottles. They were a great improvement over the whisky bottle and kid-glove-finger teats, which leaked.)

Peach returned to her armchair and resumed her embroidery after tossing a few small logs on the fire. Kim settled into the other armchair with baby and bottle, slotting his feet between Peach's on the ottoman. Other than a faint mutter of voices from behind the closed door to the bedroom, occasional pops from the fireplace and gurgles of satisfaction coming from the nursing infant, the room was blessedly quiet for a change.

 **With a pillow** under an elbow helping support the child, Kim closed his eyes and leaned his head back, paying the price for the day's mounting tension with chest pain that spiked every time he drew a deep breath. Even the small pressure of the baby against his ribs was noticeable. He wasn't about to put her down, though.

The feeling of wellbeing Kim craved proved elusive. No matter how hard he concentrated on ascending to that plane of spiritual calmness, finding his happy place, he just couldn't get there. He was overcome with a wave of homesickness followed by a rising tide of resentment against the events of the past six months as well as the injustice of what was happening here now—the suspicions, the accusations, the emotional assaults, being examined like a specimen under a microscope, fear of the unknown dangers lurking somewhere out there and fear of the known danger waiting for him behind the curtain, everyone trying to catch him off guard and pry open the lid of his mental containment vessel. He felt like crawling into a hole and pulling it in after him. But most of all, he was starting to feel angry... and showing anger was anathema to Kim. He very seldom lost his temper but when he did, common sense deserted him. The last time it'd happened, a death had resulted.

Behind the curtain, Jess was dreaming of having run out of bullets right in the middle of a running gun battle. He was still plucking reloads from his cartridge belt when he suddenly jerked awake to the realization that, although Nurse Emma had thoughtfully unloaded his weapon, she hadn't taken it away from him nor removed his gunbelt from the bedpost. Craning his head he'd observed that it was still there, the loops fully stocked as he normally kept them. It took a frustratingly long time with his bandaged hand and the need for stealth to cover up any telltale metallic noises, but he finally got that pistol loaded, after which he dozed intermittently with his trusty sidearm a comforting presence nestled in the bed right next to his hip.

 **Some hours later** Kim, awakened by thunder rumbles and baby whimpers, found himself alone in the parlor. Rain drummed against the windows. Evidently he'd been more exhausted than he'd realized and had fallen into such a deep sleep that he hadn't been disturbed by the activities of the other residents as they reassembled to engage in their respective pre-bedtime preparations. Someone had taken the baby from him and installed her in her basket before tucking a blanket over him. A glance at the wind-up clock on Slim's desk showed that it was nearing eleven o'clock. Kim reminded himself that folks in rural environs usually did retire early so as to be up and at 'em at daybreak.

Kim didn't really want to vacate his warm station but the little lady was insisting on milk and a diaper change, followed by a burp session. With all that taken care of and the drowsy baby reinstalled in her basket on the kitchen table, he figured on relocating himself to the fainting couch once he relieved it of a few remaining stacks of laundry. Drat... he'd never got around to asking Andy to fetch his pajamas. But... judging by the snores issuing from the partition it was probably safe to sneak in there and snake them out from under the pillow...

The lamp over the dining table was still lit though turned down to its lowest setting. Kim slipped through the curtains. It was easier and less pain-inducing to sit on the bed rather than lean down, which is when he felt the edge of something hard and sharp poking him in the right buttock. Reaching underneath the blanket he pulled out his throwing knife. He was still examining it in the dim light filtering through the curtain-bedsheet, puzzling how it had got there, when he looked up to find a pair of steely blue eyes fixed on him.

Jess had twisted his torso sideways and was holding the gun in his left hand, using his bandaged paw to support the weight.

"It's loaded _now_ , mister!" he hissed, finger on the trigger.

The reaction he anticipated wasn't what he got...

 **Seconds passed before Kim,** without breaking eye contact, lowered the knife to the pillow with great deliberation. If ever there was a time to panic, this was it... with the dull glint of a gun barrel not three feet from his face. Instead, an icy calm descended on him as he slipped inexorably toward the edge of the black abyss that sucks away all sanity and reason. Elbows on knees, Kim leaned forward until his nose was a mere twenty-four inches from the instrument of destruction. Holding out one hand, he spoke softly in an almost conversational tone, enunciating each word clearly.

"Give. Me. The. Gun."

"What?"

"I said... give me that gun."

"Are you nuts?"

"I just got the baby to sleep."

Jess was momentarily distracted. "Baby?"

"If you wake her up, I'm going to take that goddam gun away from you and _ram it where the sun don't shine._ "

"That right? You and what other fool!" Jess challenged.

"Furthermore, I've had it up to here with you..."

"You _threatenin'_ me?" Jess whispered back in disbelief. _Who does this pipsqueak think he is?_

"Oh no... that was a promise, not a threat. Now hand it over..."

 **Jess was transfixed** by Kim's unblinking owl-like eyes—depthless dilated pupils encircled by thin bands of fiery gold iris. What happened next was something that _no_ _one_ had ever— _EVER_ —had the unmitigated stupidity to attempt before...

Kim simply reached over and wrapped his fingers around the barrel.

Jess automatically tried to pull back, but when Kim proved unyielding he reacted instinctively... or rather, his seldom-used and less-skilled left trigger finger did. The bullet whizzed through the curtain and ricocheted off the adobe-bricked fireplace to tunnel through the ceiling (where years later it would be discovered lodged in the bottom of Mary Grace Sherman's travel trunk containing her many journals). Shrieks of fright erupted from the women's bedroom and the baby's basket in the kitchen.

Kim never batted an eyelash. Jess was having some serious misgivings as a tug 'o war commenced... after all, he was lying on the arm holding the gun and his range of motion was limited. A second shot ripped through the curtain, narrowly missing the hanging oil lamp but scoring a direct hit on the window above the fainting couch on the other side of the room. Glass sprayed outward onto the porch, supplemented by more screaming from the first bedroom, shouts of alarm from the second bedroom and yelps of panic from Jonesy's bed, in addition to the frenzied screeching of the finches and the baby's eardrum-rupturing squalls.

As the struggle continued, another slug took out one of the chairs at the dining table, exploding splinters in all directions. By now Kim had _both_ hands firmly fixed on the barrel, finally giving it a vicious upwards and sideways twist that yanked Jess halfway out of bed and tore the gun from his grasp... but not before a fourth projectile plowed a furrow across Kim's left shoulder, penetrating the far wall over Jonesy's bed and causing a framed Currier  & Ives print to come crashing down on the hapless elder's head. Boring through the thin wallboard into the bedroom where Andy and Slim were sleeping, it shattered a shaving mirror propped on a shelf. Shards of glass rained on the floor.

About the time Kim understood he was now in sole possession of the weapon, it also came to his attention that the barrel was finger-searingly hot. He promptly dropped the gun on his foot and it bounced right in front of Jess' nose. Jess made a grab for it and fell the rest of the way out of bed.

 **Only a handful of seconds** had passed. Kim was petrified with shock at what he'd just done. Jess was stupified with incredulity because he'd been unable to stop Kim from doing it. Both were suffering mind-numbing paroxysms of pain...

When Jess had turned loose of the gun, Kim's retreating arms had slammed the barrel square onto his torso—where existing injuries were now competing for supremacy over new ones. Jess was in a similar fix... his awkward descent to the floor had cruelly jarred the casted leg and he'd pulled a back muscle. Both were deafened by the discharging of a very large gun in a very small space... but not so deaf they couldn't hear the ensuing pandemonium as bedroom doors flew open and agitated occupants spewed forth. Gunsmoke, plaster dust and the acrid stench of gunpowder permeated the atmosphere.

Simultaneously scrambling out of their beds and blindly groping for wrappers and slippers, Emmaline and Peach had thumped foreheads together. Wrenching open the bedroom door and surging forth, Emmaline tripped over her own untied sash and went sprawling. Following too close behind, Peach stumbled over her mistress and fell on top of her.

Slim had leaped out of bed so quickly he'd entangled himself in the tent and upset all the bowls of water on the floor. Slipping and sliding on an oil slick of now-cooled inhalants as he barged out of his bedroom, he failed to see the broken chair in his path... which upset his balance and launched him headfirst against a corner of the dining room table.

Andy pelted through the door and scrabbled on the floor toward his fallen sibling, howling both in fright for his brother and the pain of having slashed his heel on broken mirror glass.

Emmaline and Peach had barely righted themselves when they were immediately bowled over by three Koskis in mud-laden boots and soggy union suits, being propelled through the front door by wind-driven rain. All five went down in a jumbled heap of arms and legs.

Emmaline crawled out from under the pile and clambered to her feet—wet from dripping Finns, her face an apoplectic purple. Steaming to the back of the parlor she ripped aside the curtains with such force that one came clattering down, dowel and all. There she towered, teeth bared and bosom heaving like a forge billows, bellowing in rage.

" _ **ABSOLUTELY... THE... LAST... STRAW!"**_ Emmaline thundered. From there she segued into an unpunctuated (and unprintable) rant concerning the boys' respective intelligence and maturity levels (or lack thereof), pausing only to scream at Peach, _"DO SOMETHING WITH THAT CHILD!"_ Peach darted into the kitchen to snatch the bawling baby and retreated to the nurses' station, shutting the door behind her. Slim was coming to and Andy was helping him sit up. Afraid to move, Jonesy was sitting stock-still on his bed with his head protruding through the frame of the ruined print (which fortunately had not contained any glass due to Andy's having already broken it some years before while playing Indian in the house with a homemade bow and arrow).

The Koskis had unwound themselves and were huddled by the fireplace in a spreading pool of muddy water. Jess lay helplessly on his back between beds, consumed with muscle spasms and unable to move or even speak. Kim stood over him with an unfocused expression as rivulets of blood streamed down his arm to splatter on the floor and his supine adversary.

After a solid minute of diatribe without seeming to take a breath, Emmaline came to a summation of sorts. Pointing a finger at Jess, she proclaimed, _"YOU, SIR, ARE A MENACE TO SOCIETY! YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF CONTROLLING YOURSELF, JESS HARPER! YOU SHOULD BE LOCKED UP AND THE KEY THROWN AWAY FOR GOOD!"_ Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo had totally lost it.

In the stunned silence that followed the front door swung open again, admitting gusts of more wind and rain and ushering in a tall yellow-slickered figure.

"Hi y'all... I'm back! Didja miss me?"

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE—PART TWO_

 **AFTERMATH**

" _ **You might be a nurse if you firmly believe that**_ **'Too Stupid To Live'** _ **should be a diagnosis."**_ _(seen on a bumper sticker)_

 **All heads turned toward Sally** as she butted the door closed and hung her hat on the nearby peg rack. Her eyes swept the scene of carnage as she fought to maintain her composure. _What fresh hell is this?!_

"Oh dear... have I come at a bad time...?"

Emmaline suddenly burst into tears, throwing her hands up to her face and making for the bedroom. The door slammed shut and bounced open again as Peach dashed out, sprinting for the kitchen with the basket in which the baby was still shrieking bloody murder. The Koskis were dolefully shaking their heads in unison, waiting for someone to take charge and dispense instructions. It appeared that someone would have to be Sally.

Divesting herself of the slicker, Sally closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer. _"Elohim shebashamyim, ten li ko'ach..."—_ not so much for physical strength as the fortitude to deal with this disaster. Sally didn't consider herself especially spiritual and she didn't subscribe to any one belief system... hers was more of an _à la carte_ approach—in her mind all theologies contained elements of truth and value... they were just different paths up the same mountain to a higher power. Religious ideologues were anathema to her. So for good measure she added _"Om tare tuttare ture svaha"_ and _"Dear Lord, give me strength and direction for today... and the patience and rationality to get this mess sorted out."_

Hoping that covered all bases, Sally turned her attention to the question of where to begin.

 **Though having no hands-on** triage experience in wartime situations, she was a _mother..._ with a good grounding in first aid. She'd spent enough time in the clinic with her brother and aunt to know that the presence of blood and/or broken limbs didn't necessarily constitute an emergency. First things first...

"Don't anyone move until I tell you!" she barked, not that anyone was.

"Andy... hush that sniveling and wrap this around your foot..." Sally threw him a diaper and a towel. "Use the towel to soak up the blood on the floor before someone slips in it. Leave your brother alone... he might have a concussion." _God, I'm turning into my aunt!_

"Matt... sit tight... I'll be right with you." An unnecessary and useless statement as he was too addled to move.

Sally grabbed a folded Indian blanket and some towels from the fainting couch and tossed them at the Koskis. "Feetrikki, Roopertii... get those boots off and put 'em out on the porch. Pull that couch away from the wall and plug up the holes in the window... use the blanket to sop up the floor..."

"Yah, miss..."

She pointed at Oxtoe. "Oscari... you take my slicker and hat. Go to the _vardo_ and get dry clothes and rain gear for you and your brothers. Come straight back... and bring whatever liquor you've got left."

"Yah, miss." The extra-large yellow raincoat hung clear down to the old gnome's ankles and Sally's too-big chapeau splayed his ears out sideways as he prepared to brave the elements.

Sally called for Peach. The old woman cautiously poked her head from around the corner, fingers working her prayer beads ninety to nothing and eyes big as saucers. "Start boiling some water. Get some tea going... and coffee! And try to get that baby quieted down." The head nodded and disappeared.

 **Moving over to where** Kim was swaying on his feet—he needed to be moved out of the way so they could get to Jess—Sally was dismayed to observe that although he was looking straight at her, his eyes were flat and unfocused. "Kim? Are you in there?" No response. She took him by the unbloodied arm. "Come with me... careful... don't step on Jess!" _Think... think... what's the procedure for shock?_

Maneuvering Kim into one of the easy chairs by the fireplace, Sally unbuttoned his shirt partway and slipped it off the shoulder to inspect the wound. It wasn't that bad—the bullet had missed the collarbone—but it was still bleeding copiously. "Roop, hand me one of those diapers, please..." Folding it against the wound, she instructed the Finn to keep pressure on it until the bleeding stopped or at least slowed down.

Then Sally beckoned Feets to help lift Jess off the floor back into his bed—not easily accomplished as there was just the two of them, but there wasn't room between the beds for anyone else. Right away she could see something was terribly wrong... Jess' face was white and strained, his forehead dotted with beads of perspiration. _Surely it isn't his leg rebroken inside the cast... pleasepleaseplease don't let it be a broken back!_ "Jess... where are you hurt?"

Somehow his left hand had found hers and was squeezing it so tightly she could hear her own heartbeats thrumming in her ears. "Back... hurts... bad... pulled something..." he managed to grit out through clenched teeth, tears leaking from closed eyes.

"All right... hold on... I'll be right back. Feets... get his shirt off, please." The pajama top was speckled with Kim's blood—so were the bottoms, for that matter, but she refrained from requiring he be depantsed in public as well... that could be got around to later. Prying Jess' fingers off her hand, Sally went to the kitchen to ask Peach if she knew where the key to the medicine chest was.

"Miz Emma have."

"Then go in and get it, please..."

The old lady wasn't about to get anywhere her deranged mistress. "Nooooooooo... _You_ get. _I_ keep bibi!"

 _Shit!_ Sally didn't have time to argue. She strode to the front bedroom to find Emmaline had thrown herself on the bed face down, still sobbing. The key was in the first place Sally looked—on a lanyard around her aunt's neck. Taking it and the traveling nurse kit, Sally returned to the kitchen where she quickly unlocked the chest. Intuition having informed her that Jess was experiencing severe muscle spasm, her intention was to first hit him with a dose of laudanum mixed with honey, then introduce morphine via direct intramuscular injection once she isolated the source. Then, while waiting for the oral sedative to take effect she could attend to Slim and Andy. Knowing it would take too long to coax the patient into swallowing it, Sally detailed Feets to force it down his gullet if necessary.

 **Squatting by the dining table,** Sally took Slim's face in both hands. "Matt... Matthew... speak to me... can you hear me?" Andy had stopped crying and was still sitting nearby with his legs splayed out.

To Sally's surprise Slim opened his eyes and gave her a lop-sided grin. She helped him up so that he leaned against a table leg. "I'm okay... got a headache, though." The grin disappeared just as quickly, replaced by an anxious frown. "What happened? I heard gun shots..."

"Just a little fuss over nothing... don't worry... everyone's going to be all right. Hey... you've got your voice back!"

"So I do... I guess I hit my head so hard it knocked all the cobwebs loose."

"Glad you're back!" Sally gave him a resounding smack on the lips while Andy looked on in wide-eyed curiosity.

"Did that make it better?"

"Much better!" Slim flashed one of his fabulous pantaloon-melting smiles. Andy made an odd gurgling noise, saying with an impish grin, "I wouldn't mind one a those if it'll make my foot stop hurtin'!"

Sally cut her eyes toward the boy. "Why you little scamp... are you flirting with me?"

Andy's eyes grew even larger and his face turned pink. "Oh no, Miss Sally... I didn't... I wouldn't... I ain't old enough!"

" _Am not_ , not _ain't_... and I think you're plenty old enough... pity I'm just too old for you!"

"If you two don't mind, I'd like to get up off the floor... my butt's numb," Slim cut in.

Sally laughed. "You should be lying in bed. Here... let me help you stand up..." As soon as Slim got to his feet she made him sit in one of the undamaged chairs.

"I'm beginning to feel like a dog... _sit, stand, lay_... what's next? _Fetch_ and _roll over?_ Come to think of it, the _lay down_ and _roll over_ parts sound pretty good..."

"Matt! _Not_ in front of the children!" Sally admonished, fearing there might be some brain damage after all... Slim Sherman _never_ spoke that brazenly in front of other people.

"Miss Sally... why is your face all pink?" came a query from the floor. Before she could answer, though... "Uh... Miss Sally?"

"Yes, Andy...?"

"We can't go back to bed just yet... the floor's all wet in there and there's broke glass... that's how I cut my foot."

Sally sighed. _Who died and elected me superintendent of janitorial services?_ She called to Feets. "Soon's you're done there, would you get a broom and dustpan and a mop from Peach and clean up the floor in the back bedroom? Be careful of the glass..."

"Yah, miss."

 **With Andy installed** in a chair, Sally sat in the remaining one facing him so she could take his injured foot into her lap for inspection. It was a deep cut though she couldn't see any embedded shards. She didn't think the boy could stand any probing or stitching, so she didn't try... just poured antiseptic on it and wrapped it tightly.

A plaintive voice came from behind the remaining curtain. "Maybe one of you could come and help out an old man?"

Sally's hand flew to her mouth. "Jonesy... I forgot Jonesy... Coming!" Sally jumped up and pulled the curtain aside to reveal Jonesy sitting up in bed, looking pitiful with his arms trapped at his sides by the picture frame. It was jammed on there good and tight and took a while to work loose, after which she had to vigorously massage the old man's arms to restore circulation.

 **In the meantime,** Oxtoe returned from his mission. Staggering through the door with a massive armload of requisitions protected by three layers of slickers, he looked like a giant yellow mushroom. Sally wondered how he'd been able to negotiate the yard in the dark without being able to see where he was going. He'd solved the problem of how to transport the booze by threading a piece of rope through the handles of three cork-stoppered clay jugs and tying it around his waist.

The next fifteen minutes were spent directing traffic and circulating among the stricken. Kim was still sitting by the fireplace staring into nothing, his bleeding shoulder slowed down to a trickle. The laudanum hit was doing its work on Jess—color and alertness had returned to his face and he was in considerably less distress though still grimacing with breakthrough pain. Slim and Andy looked like they were about to fall asleep in their chairs at the table.

Having already changed to dry clothing while in the _vardo_ , Oxtoe busied himself clearing the room of broken chair parts and wet, muddy and/or bloody diapers, towels and blankets—removing all to piles on the front porch. Now he teetered precariously on a kitchen chair, restoring the curtain rod to the ceiling. In the back bedroom, Feets and Roop had swapped out their soggy drawers for dry ones before removing the broken tent structure, sweeping up glass and mopping the floor. Peach had cossetted the baby back to sleep and kept the coffee and tea coming—along with liberal infusions from one of the clay jugs. No one seemed to know exactly what it contained, but the proof was astronomical.

 **Sally judged it was time** for the second stage of Jess' treatment, taking the hypodermic needle and a brown bottle of morphine from the medicine chest. Figuring his weight at approximately one hundred sixty pounds or thereabouts, she loaded the hypo with ten milligrams of morphine in suspension and concealed it in a bib pocket of her overalls. Rummaging in Jonesy's house medical cabinet, Sally located a pint bottle of the most potent liniment yet concocted by her brother and Jonesy.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's comments... ***_ _In Young Doc's and Jonesy's ongoing collaborative quest for a truly efficacious topical analgesic, the liniment's primary ingredients were mascerated peppers—marugas, nagas and habaneros—and rubbing alcohol with just enough inert ingredients so that an applicator's hands wouldn't burst into flame. Even then, dire warnings printed on the homemade label advised keeping the product well away from eyes or nose and to wash hands immediately and thoroughly after usage. Although the heat-producing chemical capsacin had been isolated some fifty years earlier, no one really yet understood how a fiery, blister-inducing substance numbed aches and pains... but it did.)_

 **Returning to Jess' bedside,** Sally was immediately confronted with a perplexing challenge... She needed to get at his back and there wasn't enough space between the wall and the bed for her to sidle in there. The only alternative was approaching from the other side and, as she explained, for that she'd need him to roll over onto his left side...

"Why? What are you fixin' to do to me?" He seemed to have forgotten that only minutes ago he'd been squeezing her hand with enough force to juice a lemon.

"I want to rub some liniment on your back... it'll relieve the spasm... but I'll have to sit on the bed and lean over you to get there..."

Even though Jess was just as leery of the lady blacksmith as he'd ever been, this seemed reasonable enough so he allowed her to help him reposition himself. This didn't leave much rump room and she was obliged to wedge her hip into the curve of his abdomen.

Jess had his arms crossed tight to his upper chest and his face smooshed down into the pillow, one blue eye regarding her with a combination of chariness and abashment at this intimate juxtaposition of their bodies. And when Sally twisted sideways into position with liniment bottle in right hand and breasts cushioned against his side, an already awkward situation swiftly devolved to an acutely embarrassing one...

"Let me know when I get to where it hurts." Sally poured liniment into the palm of her left hand and started massaging Jess' back in long gliding motions. Just as her fingertips encountered the tensed knot in his right trapezium, Jess let out a muffled groan. "I guess that's the spot, huh? Let me work on it a little... I promise this'll help cut the pain." Changing to deep kneading strokes, Sally felt her fingers and palm warming up as the adhesion dissolved... and she could feel the man's body relaxing beneath her... almost all of it. _Oh hell!_

 **Jess, too, was feeling the warmth.** Initially painful, the pressure on his back was giving over to a soothing comfort that seemed to steal all over him... and then... _the unthinkable happened_. His body was betraying him in a spectacular and uncontrollable manner... and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. Nothing separating them but the denim of her overalls and the thin cotton of his pajama bottoms—not even a sheet or a blanket, as those were jumbled at the foot of the bed. _Maybe she won't notice..._

Sally was so flustered she'd paused in her ministrations... _this had to happen now?... in front of an audience?_ Standing on the chair close by, Oxtoe was just now getting around to reinstalling the curtain and his eyes were on the ceiling. But from the dining table, Slim's and Andy's eyes were on _them_. She had to bite her tongue to suppress an irrational urge to bust out giggling. _No, no, no! That won't do at all...!_

"Quit squirming..." she demanded in a whisper. "You're just making it worse!"

"Can't help it... " he whispered back, so deeply embarrassed he wanted to crawl out of his skin and under the bed.

"Act normal and no one'll know..."

"You will!"

"Well, I can't help that... think of something else..."

"I'm trying..."

"Try harder..."

"He ain't payin' no attention..."

Sally nearly lost it then... tried to disguise an escaping bubble of laughter as a sneeze.

"Is it dead yet?"

"Whaaaaat?"

"Your back... is it numb yet?"

"No!"

"Too bad..."

Sally knew how to give shots but had never before done it with her left hand... or in a place she couldn't see. The concentrated capsacin was supposed to completely numb the site so that she could administer the hypo surreptitiously without Jess' even realizing. Her hand was burning and her eyes watering from the fumes. She had to do _something_... and quickly. Slipping the hypo out of its hiding place she jabbed it in and hoped for the best.

"Ow!" Jess jerked. "What was that?"

"Nothing..."

"Was _too_ somethin'..."

"What's going on over there?" Slim called from the table. "Is he giving you trouble? You want me to come over there and slap him around a little?"

"No... no... that won't be necessary... Jess will be going to sleep _very_ soon..."

"I will?" He was still whispering. "How soon is...?"

Jess yielded to the powerful drug, sliding under with his incompleted question still on his lips. Sally heaved a sigh of relief, deftly pulling the covers over him as she stood up—honor and equilibrium remaining intact for both of them.

 **Feets and Roop appeared** in the back bedroom door to announce the room was ready for occupancy and would she like to make an inspection tour? Yes... but first she had to wash her hand in cold water... very cold water. Once inside the room, Feets drew Sally into the far back corner, addressing her in a lowered voice. "I tink, miss... bedder ve schtay here in hoose tonide, yah?"

She considered that that would be a very good idea indeed... the storm was still raging outside.

Feets was pointing to the bunk beds and cot behind the partition. "Schleep chere, yah?"

"Yah... I mean, yes... that would be fine." With three unused beds, no problem.

When they turned toward the door they met Andy coming in, hop-limping on one foot. Slim was right behind him, supporting Jonesy.

"Where do you think you're going?"

Andy answered, "Jonesy says he won't be able to sleep a wink out there with them, so he's gonna sleep in my bed, I mean Jess' bed, and I'm gonna take the cot in the back. If that's all right with you, Miss Sally..."

"I can speak for myself, thank you," Jonesy grumbled. "At least I can quit worryin' about getting shot or buried alive."

Great. _Now_ there was a problem.

"Well, the Koskis are staying here tonight... so they'll be needing the bunks and the cot. Somebody has to sleep in Jonesy's bed or on the couch."

Andy beamed. "Can I have the bed next to Jess? Can I? Kim can use Jonesy's!"

Slim frowned. "Wait a minute... where're your manners? Shouldn't you offer the lady her choice of beds first? And Miss Sally's too big for the couch..."

"Excuse me... what do you mean, _too big?!_ " Sally said indignantly.

Slim made a good recovery. "I meant, _too tall_... your feet would hang off."

"That's better!"

"I didn't think a that..." Andy apologized. "Slim's right. It's okay, Miss Sally... I'll take the couch... you take the bed."

"Why thank you, Andy! That's real gentlemanly of you. I'm sure I'll be quite comfortable there."

 _What a boondoggle!_ Sally wasn't thinking too kindly toward her aunt right then, having been abandoned to supervise the boys' dormitory in a pediatric madhouse.

Returning to the parlor, Sally glanced at the clock on the desk as she swept past. Pushing one o'clock. No wonder her eyes were feeling gritty. She stopped herself from rubbing them just in time even though she'd washed her hands once already.

 **Feets was charged with** remaining in the back bedroom while the trio changed into fresh nightgear (Slim and the boy had both managed to smear themselves in the blood Andy's leaking heel had left on the floor earlier, and Jonesy was itching with plaster dust). Then he was to collect and remove the soiled clothes and return to make ready the cot and bunks for himself and his brothers.

Sally was pleased to find that Oxtoe and Roop had taken the initiative in restoring Jess to his original position on his back and re-elevating the casted leg. The Finns were by now looking as exhausted as she felt—and they weren't done yet... there was still Kim to look after. Except... where was he?

The umistakable sounds of vigorous projectile vomiting were drifting through the open front door.

" _ **Hellfireanddamnation!"**_ Sally swore, swerving toward the door.

Roop and Oxtoe both beat her there, holding up their hands to block her passage. "Vee get hims. Djoo vait!" Roop declared firmly, closing the door behind them.

Roop stuck his head back in a moment later. "Miss Sollee, dat Kimb... him trow oop on hisself und now him pass out. Bloods all ofer portch...ve need stuffs for clean up... hot wasser, soaps, towlse... und blanket."

"Shit!" Sally swore. As the mother of a young son Sally was used to cleaning up bodily effluvia but that didn't mean she enjoyed doing it. She gathered the requested items and handed them out to Oxtoe through the door, sending Peach to strip the plaster-coated linens off Jonesy's bed and remake it—thinking it wise to put space between the two combatants whether or not they were conscious.

Now reeling with fatigue, Sally discounted the idea of attempting to suture Kim's shoulder wound until her hands were steadier. Instead she assembled bandages, antiseptic and another morphia hypo and waited for the Koskis to haul him in.

It was close to two o'clock by the time Sally finished. Sitting at Slim's desk she composed a short note to her brother, sealing it in an envelope and presenting it to Feets.

"At first light could one of you boys... whichever one wakes up first... take this to Old Doc? Take my mare... she's fastest."

"Yah, miss."

 **Dismissed with thanks,** the Finns filed into the back bedroom where Slim and Jonesy were loudly snoring. Rousing Peach, who'd long since given up and laid her head on the table, Sally propelled her toward the front bedroom with assurances that the lioness within was past roaring. Andy was snuggled under a quilt with three layers of old buffalo robes protecting him from the dampness of the fainting couch. Both Jess and Kim appeared to be sleeping naturally, with strong pulses and even, rhythmic breathing. The baby was sound asleep in her basket.

Sally put the basket on the floor next to the empty middle bed and peeled down to her underwear—a chemise and men's longjohn bottoms, wrapped herself in the last remaining quilt and lay down on the bare mattress from which Peach had removed the blood-stippled sheets and blanket. Her last conscious thoughts were of the incongruity of the situation... All in one night she'd experienced an unintended intimate moment with the man after whom she secretly lusted, received an inadvertent proposition from a teenage boy, been treated to an unobstructed perusal of another man to whom she was strongly attracted... and her lover was sleeping in the room next door. The Prairie Rose girls would leap out of their garters with glee when they heard this ridiculous story! Sally would never live it down...


	22. Chapter 22

_CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO—PART ONE_

 **IDLE MINDS AND THE DEVIL'S TOOLBOX**

" _ **The females of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat."**_ _(Don Marquis)_

 **Wednesday, October 5…** An approaching high pressure system preceded dawn, pushing ahead of it a gusty wind that quickly dried the upper layer of mud in the yard to a crunchy crust overlying a pudding-like layer underneath. By first light it was eminently clear that Indian Summer was over with for the season. Making their feeding rounds earlier, Feets and Oxtoe noted that practically overnight the stock had sprouted stiffly whorled coats heralding the winter to come. They'd surely have to hustle to get Mister Slim's cattle rounded up and moved to winter pasture before first snowfall. They surely hoped Young Doc's promised help would arrive soon.

As Roop had to get up extra-early to carry out Miss Sally's assignment, his brothers got up with him. All three soundlessly tiptoed through the sleeping household in their stockinged feet, slipping into their cold boots outside the front door. Oxtoe went to saddle Miss Sally's big black mare, already in a stall in the barn. The other two went to the _vardo_ so Roop could collect his cold-weather riding gear while Feets warmed up some leftover coffee for him. By the time a canteen had been filled with half-coffee, half-whiskey, Roop was geared up and Oxtoe brought around the horse. They watched their brother ride off into the darkness then dispersed to get an early start on chores. Feets sneaked eggs from underneath sleeping chickens on the nest. Deecy didn't appreciate being prodded to her feet so Oxtoe could get to her udder and gave him a vicious kick to the shin to get the point across.

The Finns kept an eye on the house chimney, waiting for a trickle of smoke to indicate someone was up and about so they could deliver eggs, milk and a load or two of firewood. In the meantime they fed and watered Andy's pets, selected four horses for the morning relay and curried them to a fare-thee-well in the corral, brought the harnesses out of the barn and arrayed them in readiness on the corral fence. The sky was paling and still no smoke. Having run out of things to do, they wandered over to the _vardo_ where Feets started another pot of coffee and Oxtoe readied a quick breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, sardines and bread toasted over their campfire.

What on earth was going on? The folks in the Big House _never_ slept this late! Had they succeeded in murdering one another during the night? The boys were afraid to go over there and knock on the door.

 **Several factors contributed** to wake up Sally, curled up on her left side facing Kim. She had to pee like a racehorse, she sensed movement in the bed nearby, and the baby was conspicuous by its absence. Cautiously slitting open one bleary eye, she found Kim propped up on his right elbow, regarding her with sleepy-eyed reverence. His quilt had slipped down, exposing the bandages wound around his upper chest and over his left shoulder.

"What're _you_ lookin' at?"

"You. Do you know how beautiful you are in the morning?"

Kim's dulcet tenor was soothing to the ear as the soughing of leaves in a summer breeze, whereas Jess' velvet baritone enveloped one with the warmth of a pashmina shawl on a cool evening. Slim's voice, also baritone, fell somewhere between—comforting, expressive and tender in intimate moments, clear and decisive otherwise. There were times Sally might have savored a honeyed paean such as this flowing in her direction from any of the three... but this wasn't one of them.

"Are you brain-damaged or just blind?" she spat irritably.

"No... really... you are. I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it."

Sally sat bolt upright, the quilt falling to her waist. If she looked anywhere near as ghastly as she felt, he ought to be turning to stone right about now. Her bedhair rivaled Medusa's snakes for fearsomeness. The pillowprints on her face resembled a desert road map. The bags under her eyes felt like steamer trunks. Plus, that mug of absinthe Roop had pressed on her while she was writing the note to her brother last night—more likely the _second_ mugful—had left her with a monumental headache. She could easily slay a dragon just by breathing in its general direction.

Kim's expression had turned to appreciative awe. "What are you doing there?"

"What do you mean, what am I doing here? I told you I was coming back."

"What I meant was, what are you doing _there_... in _that_ bed?"

"Everyone has to sleep _somewhere._ "

"But that's _my_ bed... why am I in _Jonesy's_ bed?"

"Because I'm in _your_ bed."

"Yeah... I can see that—not that I mind—but...where's _Jonesy?_ "

"He's in _Andy's_ bed next door."

"Then where's... never mind... I probably don't want to know."

"Could y'all keep it down to a dull roar? A sick man's tryin' to sleep over here!" came the gravelly complaint from the other corner.

Sally slowly rotated her torso to face the speaker—if she turned her neck too quickly her head might go spinning off—and bared her fangs. "Put a sock in it, buster!"

"Hey... that ain't..."

"What do YOU want?"

"Miss... uh... Sally... I... I... ai ai ai..." Jess stammered, unable to finish the sentence, his eyeballs protruding in stupefaction.

"Well? What's the matter with _you_? Cat got your tongue?"

Jess made a noise between a bleat and a squeak, his mouth opening and closing like a guppy. His eyes weren't on her face. Neither were Kim's.

 **Sally suddenly caught onto** the problem and looked down. The dainty pink ribbons that held together the keyhole neckline of her nainsook chemise had come untied and her bounteous assets were in flagrant danger of outspillage.

"Oh for heaven's sake... grow up!" Sally threw the covers off and carefully swung her legs off the bed. "Don't you little boys ever think of anything else?!" Collecting shirt and overalls from the footboard, she haughtily stalked off through the curtains, the too-snug men's undies outlining every bodacious curve.

Andy had awakened to the sound of voices from the other side of the room and was sitting on the edge of the fainting couch when Miss Sally came out from behind the curtain... _nekkid!_... or so it seemed to his unfocused eyes. Surely not! His mouth fell open and his eyes hung out at the ends of their stalks. She pointed a finger at him and snarled.

"Don't you look at me like that or I'll turn you into a pillar of salt!" Then she passed out of sight into the kitchen where Peach was seated at the table feeding the baby, managing to look both inscrutable _and_ disapproving. No sign of coffee brewing or breakfast in the offing. At least she had the stove fired up because she'd needed it to warm the formula.

"Dammit Peach... couldn't you have started the coffee first?"

"You want, you make." They hurled insults in Cantonese at each other as Sally put on the pot and kettles to heat wash water. Carrying the shirt and overalls, she steamed by Andy on her way to the front bedroom, barking "Not one word out of you! Not. A. One!" Yanking the door open she added, "Go get dressed. Move it!" Peach skittered in right behind her, carrying the infant and slamming the door behind her.

Emmaline was already dressed and standing in front of a gilt-framed mirror, poking pins into her coiled plait. Seeing her niece's reflection, she turned and shook her head.

"What do you call yourself doing... traipsing around in your knickers in a house full of men? You look like a refugee from Irish Lily's on a Saturday night."

Sally rolled her eyes and ground her molars. "Oh, thanks a bunch! And don't start with me! I had a rough night, okay? We didn't get done cleaning up and dealing with casualties until three... I need something to wear."

"And your hair! One would think an entire family of rats has taken up residence!"

"Auntie Em... lay off, will ya? I need to borrow some clothes. Mine look like I've been to a hog killing."

"Of course, of course... help yourself." Emmaline nodded at an assortment of blouses and skirts hanging on pegs.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _Fortunately, Emmaline and Sally were about the same size with identical attributes except the older woman's waist was trifle smaller as she routinely wore the corsets that Sally disdained... except on special occasions. Sally's wardrobe at home did include fashion-dictated undergarments and a few nice dresses which she wore on her and Slim's periodic out-of-town assignations. However, as those items were incompatible with overalls, she hadn't worn any out to the Sherman ranch.)_

 **Emmaline sat on the bed** while her niece struggled into one of Emmaline's ankle-length black poplin skirts over (at the aunt's insistence) a plain muslin petticoat, topping it with a collarless long-sleeve button-up blouse over the chemise. The top three buttons simply wouldn't meet and the chemise, even with ribbons retied, did little to conceal the deep vee of cleavage. She tucked the blouse into the waistband, not caring if it made her look like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle with a hank of cord.

"Dear... at your age you really ought to be wearing a proper foundation garment. By the time you're forty..."

"Good try, Auntie Em... but that ain't gonna happen... if they sag, they sag..."

Sally rolled up her sleeves past the elbows. Time to tackle the hair. She looked in the mirror, shuddered at her hideous visage, and started tugging ineffectually at the worst tangle with a tortoiseshell comb.

Emmaline sighed and took the implement from Sally's hand. "Here... sit on the stool and let me do that." Peach, sitting on the other bed with the baby in her lap and a bottle plugged in its mouth, muttered something in Cantonese.

"What did she say?"

"She said, _'You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.'_ "

"What does that mean?"

"How the hell should I know?"

Emmaline sniffed. "Peach... give the bub to Sally and go make us some coffee. And for heaven's sake get breakfast going before there's a revolt in the juvenile ranks."

 **Meanwhile...** Kim and Jess gazed awe-struck toward the fluttering drapes...

"Too late for that!" Kim muttered forlornly.

"Too late for what?"

"Too late to _not_ think about it."

"You, too?" came the answering groan.

"Yeah, me too..."

"I ain't never seen anythin' like that in my whole life... leastways not that much of it all in one place."

"Me neither."

"She's some more all woman!" Jess marveled.

"Venus on the Half Shell meets Boadicea, Warrior Queen of the Celts!" Kim extolled.

Jess gave Kim a puzzled look. "Who meets what?"

" _Nascita di Venere?_ Botticelli?... it's a famous... never mind."

"Don't know why I never took no notice before..."

"Won't do any good to take notice now..."

"Oh yeah? Why's that? I think maybe she kinda likes me..."

"She likes Slim better..."

" _Huh?_ " Jess' eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

"Yep... she's the bossman's woman... told me herself."

"Now I _know_ that ain't true!" Jess argued. "I _live_ here. I'd know if it was."

"' _There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know,'_ " Kim said piously, adding "Thomas Chalkley, 1713."

There were a few moments of silence as Jess considered this bewildering revelation. _Slim and Sally? Sally and Slim? When? Where? How long?_ He was starting to feel left out.

"How come you know so much?"

"I read a lot... and study people. _'Read. Observe. Experiment. Learn.'_ That was our motto at college."

"You went to college?"

"Yeah."

"I ain't much on readin' and learnin' but the observin' part's sure nice! I wouldn't mind doin' me a little experimentin' neither!"

"Maybe you'll get your chance after her husband settles Slim's hash." Kim was being sarcastic and a little jealous—he knew when he was outmatched.

"Miss Sally ain't married... she's a widow... lost her man in the war, I heard."

"Is that right?" _My, my... what a fascinating tidbit of information!_

 **Awkwardly pushing himself** up to a sitting position and feeling the now familiar tweaks of pain in his torso, Kim was mystified to find that not only had it multiplied, but migrated to his shoulder as well. Looking down he discovered the swath of white bandages, though relieved to encounter blue pajama bottoms below that.

"What's this, then?" His mind, still a half-beat behind, made the connection between the bandages and the smarting shoulder.

"You don't _remember?_ " Jess was incredulous.

"Well... no..."

"You mean you _really_ ca...?"

"Just told you no, N.O. ... I..." Kim got to his feet and sank back down heavily, experiencing a mild wave of dizziness.

"Shoulder hurt much?"

"Hurts a LOT. Why? What happened? Did you shoot me or something?" Kim watched with curiosity as every one of the other man's nervous tics galloped through a gamut of emotions from disbelief to doubt to remorse... eyebrows seesawing, jaws quivering, fingers flexing like spiders doing push-ups. He looked like a cat attempting to yak up a hairball. Kim was prepared to wait him out... until he also realized his roomie was in the throes of an urgent personal problem. Compassion for a wardfellow in distress overcame reservation.

"You... ah... need some assistance?"

"You could say that..."

"I believe there's one under your bed there... hang on..."

A few minutes later, problem resolved and the container safely toed back underneath and out of sight, Kim sat on the middle bed close enough so that they could resume their conversation in lower tones.

"You were about to say something...?"

"Yeah... It was me," Jess admitted, looking away. "I did it."

"Did what?"

"Shot you."

It was Kim's turn to be stunned. "You're kidding?"

"No... I'm the one plugged you."

Kim was at a loss for words at first. "Well... was it an accident or did you mean to?"

"No... well, yeah, I reckon I meant to... after you come at me with that knife..."

"Whoa! Hold up... run that by me again... _**I**_ attacked _**you**_...?"

" **I'd like to hear that story myself..."**

Both were startled by Slim's comment preceding him through the curtains, where he came to stand with arms folded under a forbidding frown. _How long had he been standing there, overhearing?_

Although dressed in day clothes, Slim was far from well. His usually jocular expression was bleak and flat, his normally tanned and ruddy complexion an ashen gray and his grey eyes lacking the blue-violet tinge that gave them depth. A night spent without vapor inhalants had renewed the congestion in his lungs. He, too, had a fearful headache centered behind the big red knot decorating his forehead. No mistake, Slim Sherman was in the foulest of foul moods despite last night's display of libinous spark.

"You already know what happened, Slim," Jess said unhappily.

"Everyone knows the _result_... not _why_ it happened, so why don't you just start from the beginning."

Scratching his armpits, Andy sidled in right behind his brother, rigid with attention, ears perked. Before Jess could get started, Jonesy hobbled in to join them and settled himself next to Kim. "Shove over! I wanna hear this, too!"

Slim and Andy continued to stand while Jess got through his explanation, up to the point where Sally pulled that dirty trick on him with the liniment and then stabbed him in the back.

"What are you complaining about? Guess where she stabbed _me!_ " Kim put in dryly, rubbing his hip.

Slim's frown turned in Kim's direction. "How about you? Do you have anything to contribute?"

"What _he_ said," Kim answered. "All I remember is sitting down on something sharp under the blanket... turned out to be the knife I dropped Sunday night. I had it in my hand, wondering how it got there, next thing I know there's a gun in my face... everything after that's a blank."

The glare of censure returned to Jess. "So what I'm hearing is... you claim he jumped you with a knife, you shot four times at point-blank range... and _missed_ him three times in a row? And you expect me to believe this...?"

"Well... yeah, Slim... that's how it happened." Jess essayed a weak grin. "Pretty dern embarrasin', too... even if I _was_ shootin' south-pawed. You ain't gonna tell no one, are you?"

Giving no sign he found any humor there, Slim said, "Did you stop to think you might've hit Jonesy... or Andy? One of those bullets came right through the wall... right over his head."

Jess was appalled. "I didn't know that. I wasn't thinkin', Slim... I was just reactin' when he grabbed the gun..."

"That's just the problem. That's _always_ your problem... you don't take even a second to think first..."

"But Slim... I..."

"Enough." Slim cut him off with an upraised palm and swiveled a finger back to Kim with a scorn-laden voice. "And you... claiming total blackout... what a convenient way of avoiding taking ownership of your actions."

"I didn't do anything to take ownership of!" Oppression once again homed in on Kim, sapping his will to argue in his own defense. He was already feeling distinctly unwell in addition to the original pains.

"Trying to take away Jess Harper's gun was about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of! You endangered other lives by putting him in a no-win situation like that. If you'd backed off like a sensible person he wouldn't have fired that weapon..."

"Now you just wait a minute, pard!" Jess may've been down but his spirit certainly wasn't out. His growl overrode his friend's rant. "Sure, it was a dumb thing to do... but at the same time it's just about the bravest thing I ever seen anyone do. I reckon he thought maybe he was tryin' to stop me from accidentally shootin' an' hurtin' someone else!"

Jonesy spoke up. "Don't go getting yourself all worked up, Slim... you're supposed to be resting... and there's some truth in what Jess is saying."

"There's a mighty thin line between bravery and idiocy."

"I know... but I've heard of this sort of blackout before... you've seen it yourself. You just count to ten and calm down. Try to remember what it was like for you. You told me yourself about getting caught up in your first firefight in the war, scared plumb out of your wits and later not being able to recollect exactly what _did_ happen. Maybe that's what happened to Kim here last night. I know if Jess ever drew on me I'd probably faint dead away or just expire on the spot!"

The choler slowly leached from the rancher's face as he absorbed Jonesy's words, which he knew to be true. He stroked his chin, growing pensive. "Maybe you're right, Jonesy... maybe I'm being a little unfair. Nevertheless, I'm disgusted with the both of 'em and we're gonna have us an attitude adjustment discussion about this later."

At the mention of 'war,' Andy had eased back out of Slim's peripheral vision. His brother's military service was a closed book in this house and he'd learned not to ask about it. And whenever they'd had visitors—men who'd fought alongside Lieutenant Matthew Sherman—and conversation had inevitably turned to recollections of their shared experiences, Slim had always sent him to bed or outside to play or do chores. Jess likewise refused to talk about his time in uniform. Andy most assuredly didn't want to miss out on this rare opportunity.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary...**_ _The late not very Civil War was a topic to be avoided if possible in this household where two men who had fought on opposing sides were now building a friendship. Someday in the far future they would be able to openly and without rancor discuss their experiences with each other, but that time hadn't yet come... the conflict and its aftermath were too recent and the memories too raw. And of course, no one knew at this point whether Kim had been a participant or, if so, on which side he may have served.)_

 **Andy had a question** he knew for sure would bring down Slim's wrath on his head—if not now, then later... but he simply couldn't help himself. Out it came...

"What side did you fight on, Kim... north or south?

Dead silence reigned in the crowded corner of the orthopedic ward. Kim sensed a strong undercurrent of tension but couldn't identify the source. Since coming into this household he'd not given much thought to the likelihood of both Slim and Jess having fought in the recent conflict. To Kim, Andy's question was rational and simple... requiring a rational, simple explanation.

"Neither one, Andy. It wasn't my war."

"Slim says..." Andy hesitated, expecting an objection from his scowling brother. "Slim says every able-bodied man has a moral obligation to fight for the side he believes in... that the ones who don't are yellow-bellied cowards or profiteers..."

"Every man's entitled to his own opinion..." Kim noted.

"Andy!" Slim was making a concerted effort to contain his temper. "I also said there are other ways to support a cause besides soldiering. You seem to have forgotten what I taught you about taking things out of context! I'm sure Kim had his reasons..."

Andy was torn between a desire to emulate his brother's patriotic idealism and an unwillingness to accept that his new friend might be a coward or worse... a deserter. The stubborn streak he shared with his brother wasn't giving up so easily. "Well... maybe his tribe was neutral or something... maybe he was a conchi... a conshi..."

"I think the words you're looking for are 'conscientious objector'," Kim said quietly. "But that's not it, either. I guess I should have clarified what I meant. This is _your_ country, not mine, Andy—I'm just a visitor here. Mostly what I know about your war is that it made a lot of people very rich back home. Some folks call it profiteering but to them it was just a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity to set themselves up for life. That's what war's all about... greed and profit."

"So you're not really an Indian?" Andy couldn't hide his disappointment. Slim tried to shush him.

"No, I'm not."

"Not even half a one?"

"Not even. But since we're on that subject..." Here Kim turned his eyes to Jess but seemed to be looking past him. "Everyone's got prejudices of one kind or another—even where I come from we have conflicting cultures—but for the most part we've learned to get along and share the land. For the record—although I understand that your experiences with your natives have shaped your attitudes—the ones I've met since I've been here have been nothing but kind and helpful to me even though I'm not one of them. If I were, I'd be proud of that heritage. You all don't seem to understand that their civilizations existed long before you Europeans ever got here, yet you're systematically annihilating them one nation at a time. They're only trying to hold on to what was theirs to begin with. By the end of this century, they'll be gone and future generations will be poorer for the loss of their cultures."

Kim slowly looked around at the other four and sighed. "Sorry. Didn't mean to preach."

Slim was shifting uneasily from foot to foot. "It's too early in the morning for philosophical debate. We've got other things to worry about... like breakfast. I don't even smell any coffee. Where are the women, anyway?"

"Miss Peach and Miss Sally are in the front bedroom with Miss Emma, Slim. I don't think it'd be a good idea to bother 'em right now," Andy quickly contributed, his face turning pink. "Um... Miss Sally... she's not in a real good mood."

"Is that right? Well... I need to see a man about a horse anyway and I'm sure you do, too. Jonesy, you coming?"

"In a minute... you go on ahead."

A second later the curtains swished on empty space, leaving the older man with Kim and Jess.

" **Figures," Kim said sourly.** "He doesn't mind dishing out lectures but sure doesn't want to hear one."

"What you have to understand about Slim..." Jonesy ventured, "... is that he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders... the ranch, the boy, his neighbors... even old Jess here..."

"I don't need him lookin' out after me!" Jess cut in indignantly. "I can look after myself."

"What _you_ don't understand, Jess, is that he's come to look on you as a brother... you're part of his world now so he feels responsible for your welfare."

"As for the Indians," Jonesy turned to Kim, "he understands full well what you're saying... and deep down he agrees. But you can't stop progress. We'd all like to be able to get along with them but they're the ones not too keen on the idea."

Kim stood up, overcome with an unaccountable weariness and Jonesy's practiced eye registered someone just about at the end of his tether. "You don't look so good, son. I think maybe you'd better go lie down for a while longer."

"I think you're right..."

"But not out here... it's liable to get noisy in here later today. Jess is gonna have a busy day..."

"I am?"

"Today you graduate to a wheelchair, remember? I already asked Oxtoe to bring it out of the barn and clean it up so it'll be ready when Young Doc gets here."

Jonesy beckoned to Kim. "You come with me, son... the back bedroom's empty right now. Take one of the bunks in back where it's dark and quiet. No one'll bother you."

"Sounds good to me." Kim was in the process of exiting the cubicle behind Jonesy when Jess called out to him.

"Hey... Kim... wait!"

Kim paused and turned his head. "Yeah, Jess?"

"I just wanna say... I'm sorry... sorry as I can be about everything."

"I know."

"So are we okay?"

"For the moment, yeah. Are we even? No. Not by a long chalk." Kim grinned. "Just remember, _pard_... payback is hell."

The ice jam was broken.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO—PART TWO_

 **BREAKFAST, WHEREFORE ART THOU?**

" _ **Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."**_ _(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)_

 **Feets and Oxtoe were sopping up** the last runnels of egg yolk with hunks of sourdough when they spotted the first trickle of chimney smoke and, shortly thereafter, Mister Slim, Mister Jonesy and the boy ambling, hobbling and limping—respectively—toward the outhouse.

A few minutes earlier inside the house, Peach had thrust the infant at Sally and shuffled to the bedroom door trailing commentary to the effect that her employer should enjoy an infestation of body lice in her nether regions, emerging just in time to cross the paths of Slim and Andy booting up for their trek to the little brown shack out back. Andy gave her a pathetic look, miming putting a spoon up to his mouth. "Breakfast? Eat? Soon?" He made sure to talk real loud... so she'd understand.

Peach gave him a toothless smile (her dentures were soaking in a glass in the kitchen) and gabbled her earnest desire that a diarrhetic vulture would presently defecate on his head.

"What'd she say, Andy?" Slim inquired as they stepped onto the porch.

"Beats me... but I sure hope she meant we'll be having breakfast soon."

Back in the bedroom, Emmaline's fingers expertly wove Sally's thick tresses into a single loose plait. "I feel I should apologize for dumping all this on you last night... I don't know what came over me. What happened after I... er... left?"

Sally gave her a detailed accounting, including this morning's antics. "What is it with men anyway? Is that all they ever think about?"

Emmaline shrugged. "Pretty much... that and food. Haven't you figured that out by now?" Eventually they both agreed Sally was presentable enough to exit the bedroom despite (in Emmaline's opinion) an excess of unladylike jiggling.

Peach was breaking eggs into a bowl. Bacon grease was melting in the big skillet on the stove. Thin pink slices of sugar-cured ham waited on a platter nearby. An empty bowl on the counter next to a sack of meal indicated corn dodgers in the oven instead of the usual biscuits. The coffee was done and she'd already graced the table with cups, spoons, sugar and cream.

When queried as to the men's whereabouts Peach was suddenly a fountain of information, all of which was incomprehensible to Emmaline.

"What did she say?"

"Jonesy, Slim and Andy went to the outhouse. Jess is snoozing. Kim's in the back bedroom. The Koskis are outside doing chores and one of them rode away before dawn."

 _(_ **Gracie's note...** _Peach had a hard enough time distinguishing one_ gweiloh _from another, much less committing their names to memory or even trying to pronounce them. It was much easier to assign titles based on her perception of familial relationships. Thus Slim was_ goh-go _[older brother], Andy was_ daih-dai _[younger brother], Jonesy was_ suk-suk _[generic uncle], Jess was_ biu-go _(older male cousin) and Kim was_ biu-dai _[younger male cousin]. The three Finns were_ lo beng _[old cookies]. Worked for her.)_

 **Sally had the baby** up to her toweled shoulder, trying to encourage a burp as she sat at the table waiting for the hot, sweet coffee to percolate down to her toes. Emmaline sat across from her, drumming her fingers on the tabletop and sipping cautiously at the scalding liquid while mentally organizing everyone else's day. The Koskis, for instance, would not be out chasing cows—she had other things in mind for them.

Emmaline wondered how long it would be before Roop returned with Young Doc in tow, and debated whether or not to wait for his arrival to proceed with transferring Jess from bed to wheelchair. She expected that her plans for _him_ today would encounter some difficulties, not the least of which was the clothing issue... or more precisely, lack thereof.

When the child finally produced a satisfying belch, Sally settled her in the basket. Although the cloud of cephalalgia was slowly dissipating, worries were piling up—her aunt's astounding apology, for one.

Auntie Em had always been solid as the Rock of Gibraltar when it came to taking charge of emergencies... and in living memory she'd never once admitted to failure. So it was with a measure of sadness and a flash of panic that Sally realized for the first time that someday—maybe not so far off—the mantle of matriarch of their small family would fall to her. This wasn't a responsibility she craved.

Sally wasn't unhappy with life. She had it pretty good for a 'widow' on her own with a child to bring up. Yaakov's parents had left her well-provided with a debt-free house and a livery/blacksmith business that yielded a comfortable income. Her artisanal skills provided discretionary funds as well as fulfilling her creative needs. Yet, there was something missing.

Knowing she didn't in any way conform to most men's ideals as a suitable helpmeet, Sally had nonetheless assumed she'd eventually find another man to love and marry... but the years had rolled by without any decent prospects presenting themselves. There _was_ Slim, of course—a charming, tender and considerate lover who without doubt would be an excellent father to Jacob—but the spark of passion just wasn't there and they both knew it. It would be a mistake for them to marry.

Sally was flirting with guilt on several levels this morning, telling herself that if it weren't for the exigencies of the Sherman's situation and her personal attachment to Slim, she wouldn't even be here at the expense of her own child and home and business. But that wasn't quite true. Aside from yesterday's momentary lapse, Aunt Emmaline was perfectly capable of managing crises without her assistance. Jake was not being neglected in the least—he was having a splendid time with his cousins at the grandparents' house. Avery had the business firmly in hand. No... something else had brought her back here and was keeping her here... two somethings, actually—and neither one was Slim... but she wasn't sure she was ready to examine those reasons too closely just yet because they were so totally outrageous.

One of them was her crush on Jess Harper, to whom she'd been introduced by Slim as a 'my farrier friend' only a few weeks after the gunfighter's arrival in Laramie. The dark-haired stranger with the haunting blue eyes had quite literally taken her breath away... not that Slim wasn't a fine-figured man in his own right. She would've been sorely tempted to proposition Jess right on the spot had it not been for two impediments... the 'arrangement' already existing between herself and the rancher and the intuition that she wasn't at all Jess' 'type' (women know these things!).

In the past five months Jess hadn't expressed any interest whatsoever in Sally outside of their limited acquaintanceship through Slim, so their _liaison passionnée_ had remained imaginary. Sleeping in the bed next to him had been a vicarious thrill—as close as she was ever likely to get in bringing that fantasy to life. But still... thinking about the play of hard-wired muscles under her hand last night brought a sheen of perspiration to her forehead.

Then there was that _other_ reason she'd felt compelled to return to the ranch. Just what she needed, Sally thought with disgust—yet another man to complicate her existence. There was no category that adequately described her feelings toward this individual, other than he'd captured her fancy with words. At any other time and place she'd probably not have taken notice of him... and now she couldn't put him out of her mind. It was really too exasperating...

 **Sally's ruminations** were interrupted by the return of the privy trekkers, milling around the open door as they removed their muddy boots. Drifts of cumulus clouds scudded across a pearl gray sky, underlit in pastel hues by the rising sun still hidden behind the mountains. The air blowing through the door was fresh and crisp. Suddenly realizing the interior of the house was correspondingly chill, Sally hurriedly draped a towel over the baby's basket and went to the fireplace where Slim was already arranging logs on the grate. Jonesy and Andy hurried to the kitchen table while Sally knelt beside Slim on the hearth, handing him logs from the basket.

"You're supposed to be resting, Matthew! Freddy will have a fit!"

"Can't stay in bed forever. Got work to do." His voice was mostly restored though hoarse and cracked and he was still coughing and wheezing.

"The only thing you need to be working on is getting well," Sally scolded, putting a hand up to her lover's brow. "You still have a fever. What were you thinking, going outside without a jacket?! You shouldn't have gone outside at all... and Andy needs to keep off that foot!"

Slim gave her a weak grin. "Yes, Mother. I'll wear a coat next time and sling Andy over my shoulder." He looked over her shoulder to ensure the others were occupied and gave Sally a peck on the cheek. "I'll sure be glad when things get back to normal around here."

"You that anxious for me to be gone and out of your hair?"

"Everyone else... not you."

"You're such a slick-tongued rascal!"

"Who, me? I think you've got me confused with someone else under this roof! And I was thinking about Cheyenne..."

"Yeah... Matt... about that..."

"I know! It'll be a while yet... but anticipation is sweet!"

Just as well Emmaline chose that moment to come out of the kitchen heading to the partitioned cubicle.

 **Jess wasn't snoozing...** too much noise, too many voices. He was morosely staring up at the ceiling, sympathizing with the struggling housefly entrapped in a spider's web. He knew exactly what that poor critter was feeling as he contemplated his current state and his immediate future. He tensed with alarm as the old battleaxe appeared through the curtains, then relaxed when she gave him a beaming smile. She must've been a right handsome woman in her salad days.

"Good morning, Jess... are you ready for breakfast?"

"Yes, m'am. Good morning to you, too," Jess replied cautiously. If the woman noticed the gunbelt still draped over the bedpost with the pistol restored to its holster, she was choosing to withhold comment.

"Let's get you propped up then..." Emmaline grasped his left forearm and pulled him to a sitting position while stuffing pillows between his back and the headboard with her other hand. As she leaned forward to adjust the pillows he pulled the quilt up to his chest, clutching it with the fingers of both hands lest it make an indecent retreat.

"Your right hand appears to be making progress... I think we can dispense with the binding now." She undid the ties that had been holding the linen in place and removed it, holding his wrist up. "Let's see you move those fingers..."

Jess dubiously eyed the previously swollen digits, now shrunk to normal size, before experimentally curling and uncurling them... still sore and stiff but all in working order. A layer of anxiety peeled away.

"Good! Very good indeed!"

Next, Emmaline went to the foot of the bed and rolled the quilt off his feet up to mid-thigh, where Jess grabbed it before it could ascend any further. She checked his toes and asked him to wiggle them, then tested the length of the cast from knee to ankle, thumping it professionally along the way as one would test a watermelon for ripeness. Pronouncing the plaster completely cured, she announced he would be coming out of that bed today. After breakfast she'd see about getting him some clothes.

"M'am... do you reckon I'll be able to try out those crutches today?"

Emmaline's eyes strayed to the pair of store-bought crutches leaning against the bookcase on the opposite wall. "Let's not get overambitious, Mister Harper. We still have a long row to hoe."

 _We?_ For a moment he feared the return of _Nurse Emma_ , but she was still smiling and he masked his disappointment. He didn't want to push his luck with this mercurial lady.

"Are matters settled between you and Kim?"

"Yes, m'am. I reckon so."

"May I have your word as a gentleman there'll be no more gunplay in this house?" She held out a hand and he took it, smiling back shyly.

"Yes m'am... you got it!"

Unexpectedly, she put her free hand over his. "I understand how awful this is for you, Jess. A Swiss philosopher named Rousseau once said _'Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.'_ We've already discussed how long this ordeal is going to last, if you will recall, so there's no use going over it again.

"Yes m'am, I understand that."

 **Sally arrived with the baby** in one arm and holding out a cup of coffee to Jess. He took it gratefully with both hands, astonished to find it swirling with top cream and heavily sugared—exactly the way he liked it but seldom was allowed to enjoy in the morning if Slim was on the prod to get work underway—which was always. According to Slim, real men took their coffee black and tarry enough to waterproof a shingled roof.

Sally sat down on the next bed with the baby on her lap.

"Thanks, Miss Sally." Jess could hardly believe this was the same voluptuous temptress who'd flounced out of the cubicle a mere hour or so earlier... and certainly not the hard-bitten and usually grimy blacksmith he was accustomed to seeing. This Sally was a woman he'd never seen before.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary...**_ _If Jess Harper had been a classically educated man, he could have visualized Sally Lowenstein as sitting for Auguste Rodin while the artist modeled her in clay for a future sculpture of_ 'American Pioneer Woman with Child.' _What Jess did see, only now—long black skirt, wide white apron, faded unornamented blouse, hair pulled back and loosely pinned into a practical chignon at the nape of the neck—was the living embodiment of every farm or ranch wife he'd ever known... the determined, capable women who helped their men conquer the frontier... in other words, what Kim had recognized within minutes of meeting her, and what Jess knew in his heart was the kind of women he hoped someday to take to wife.)_

" **Miss Sally..." Jess began tentatively,** conscious of Emmaline's presence but wanting to apologize for his earlier crude behavior.

Sally grinned. "Since we're bedfellows now, think you could dispense with the 'Miss' and just call me Sally?"

Emmaline threw her a questioning look and Jess blushed crimson. Sally rolled her eyes.

" _Room_ mates, then... _roommates_ , okay, Auntie Em? This bed... right here..." She pointed to the one she was sitting on.

"Sally, I hardly think it's appropriate..." Emmaline began with a prim moue.

Sally threw her head back with a laugh. "Oh Auntie Em! You run a whorehouse and I'm a blacksmith... what could be more _inappropriate?"_ At that Emmaline had to chuckle and Jess as well, though reservedly. These two women were something else!

Jess' good intentions were further thwarted as Slim, Andy and Jonesy crowded in with great big grins on their faces.

"Hey Pard... you look like shi... like somethin the cat drug in!" Jess laughed, eyes crinkling. "Whatsa matter... didn't they dig the hole deep enough?"

Slim knew he looked mighty rough. "You don't look so good yourself with that cocoon on your leg. You aiming to turn into a butterfly?"

"Naw... I'm already prettier'n you!"

"At least we'll be enjoying some peace and quiet around here since you won't be getting into any trouble any time soon!"

"Oh yeah? I can still whup your a... uh... your butt any day of the week... on one leg! Pardon me, ladies..."

"You think?"

Andy was happy to see the two back to trading insults—that meant they were getting better. If only _he'd_ stop itching!

Slim noticed something unusual on Jess' cast and bent over for a closer look. "What's this? _'Get well soon, your pal APS, 10/05/70.'_ Hmnnn... wonder who that could be?"

'Someone' pinked up. He hadn't been able to resist... there he'd been yesterday with a lead pencil in his hand and Jess catching forty winks... and that pristine expanse of white plaster...

The infant started whining and Emmaline frowned, poised to voice her annoyance as the whimpering threatened to escalate to full-blown crying. "Time to wake up the minder," she suggested. "Would one of you go in the other room and get him?"

" **No... leave him be!"** The vehemently delivered command caused all conversation to break off. All amusement gone from his face, Jess continued with hesitancy. "Let him sleep long as he needs to. I seen this before... in the war. Fella like him, brave under fire... goes 'til he can't go no more, then a couple hours or days later after the fightin's over, gettin' the shakes so bad he can't hardly get a drink a water 'thout spillin' it. Throwin' his guts up. Some can't sleep a'tall... some sleep for two, three days." After a pause, he added quietly, "It's different for everybody. Been there myself."

"Me, too," Slim contributed for the women's benefit, his face equally grave.

"I know a little about that... from Freddy," Emmaline broke in unexpectedly. "He says the medical profession has been collating information since the end of the war about long-term psychological aftereffects. They're starting to recognize a condition different from soldier's heart or nostalgia..."

"Some men can put violence behind them as soon as it's over but others... it might take months or years. Some never get over it," Slim added.

Jess wasn't done yet. "It ain't just soldiers... I seen a lotta gunslicks in the same fix. Seen 'em draw down and walk away like they got ice in their veins... then come apart later."

Here was another off-limits subject—Jess Harper's reputation as a gunfighter and what he'd done to earn it. Andy tried and failed to hide his interest.

"But that never happened to you, right, Jess? You're not scared of anyone!"

Jess knew he was treading on very thin ice here, having brought up not one but two subjects to which Slim was adamantly opposed: warfare and gun usage not related to hunting. But the boy had asked a question _and_ harbored an erroneous assumption he couldn't leave uncorrected.

"That's where you're wrong, Andy. Happens to me every time I have to go up against someone. If I weren't scared I'd never be able to pull the trigger. Bein' scared is what keeps you human. Killin' someone, you never get over that sick feelin'... you just learn to cover it up," Jess said humbly. "So I gotta tell you... Kim scared me 'bout as much as I scared him."

 **This admission brought on** a silence that stretched uncomfortably until Peach stuck her head through the curtains to hand in a baby bottle and jabber that if all the fornicating idiots in this room didn't move their fornicating behinds to the fornicating breakfast table posthaste, she was going to throw everything out to the fornicating chickens. All eyes turned to Sally.

"What'd she say?" Slim asked.

"She says breakfast is getting cold and should she start another pot of coffee?"

Before the exodus could begin, Sally stood up with her armload of infant. "I'm going to go check in on Kim. Can someone take the baby?"

Everyone unconsciously took a step backwards with arms resolutely locked at sides.

"No takers, huh? Well, I'll guess it's Plan B then!"

"What's... uh... Plan B?" Andy piped up nervously.

"Conscription!" Sally's eyes locked on Jess, who visibly shrank against his pillows.

"Oh no... no no no... not me... I don't know nothin 'bout no babies!"

"You don't have to... all you have to do is hold her and the bottle..."

Sally thrust the bundle into his arms and handed him the bottle. "Her name is Lily, by the way. Keep her head supported like so..."

"Now wait just a dadblame minute!" Jess objected a half second too late... Sally was already gone.

Looking down in astonishment, he got a gummy grin in return. (It was just gas but he didn't know that.) A dim and distant memory came to him... of being allowed to hold a newborn sibling when he was just a small boy himself... and his heart melted.

"I've seen it all now! Jess... holding a _baby?_ " Slim's face was incredulous, as was Andy's.

"Don't you start, Slim... she bushwhacked me. I didn't have a chance to say no!"

"This is priceless!" Slim started laughing and ended up in a coughing fit.

"Don't you say another word! 'Sides, what so bad 'bout a man holdin a baby?" Jess growled.

"Nothing... nothing at all... it's just... that it's YOU doing it!"


	23. Chapter 23

_CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE—PART ONE_

 **HEARTACHE AND LAUNDRY**

" _ **It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week."**_ _(Dr. Laurence J. Peter)_

 **Deliveries made, Feets and Oxtoe** accepted their new tasks from Miss Emma... most of which were pretty straightforward—remove broken/destroyed detritus from porch (check), chop more firewood (check), fire up washboiler for laundry (check), get a _second_ boiler to boiling (check) and get the sauna _kiuas_ going to preheat the bathhouse (check). Coming from a culture where daily bathing was practically _de rigueur_ , they didn't question her last directive though knowing that the other men—excepting Kim—would wonder what was up with that? Whoever heard of taking a bath in the middle of a weekday?

It had actually gotten colder since dawn. The Finns swapped their cowboy hats for knitted caps with earflaps, string ties and bobbles, with cableknit sweaters under their sheepskin jackets. They looked like a pair of garden gnomes _sans_ garden. All they needed to complete the picture were Sámi reindeer hide boots with upcurled toes.

Indoors and out, the household assumed an air of orderliness and quiet industry as everyone found (or was assigned) something to do after breakfast...

 **When Sally mentioned** they'd be needing baby clothes, Slim recollected that somewhere up in the attic was a carved cedar chest in which Mary Grace Sherman had stored her oddments of fabric and quilting pieces, carefully preserved against moths by sachets of napthelene and camphor. Maneuvering a ladder to the access hatch, he sent Andy up for a look-see. The chest yielded a wealth of usable materials including, Slim remembered with sadness, bolts of flannelette intended to clothe infants that hadn't lived long enough to need any. Baby Lily would be kitted out in style for the winter... with proper diapers, provided someone got busy sewing.

Slim was overtaken with a coughing fit as clouds of dust descended from the hatch through which Andy was dropping down bolts and cotton pillowcases of fabrics. Though he insisted it wasn't necessary—he was much, much better—Emmaline promptly re-installed him at the kitchen table with a bowl of inhalant vapor under his nose and a towel over his head.

"And after lunch, you're having a siesta whether you want to or not!"

"I don't need a nap and you can't make me!"

"We'll see about that."

 _Nurse Emma_ was lurking dangerously near to the surface, Andy sensed. He debated risking fate by asking if he could go outside and visit his menagerie of semi-domesticated wild things, already knowing the answer.

"No. Too cold and you're still stick. Get your textbooks and go study for a while." A guttural murmur from under the towel seconded that motion. Privately reckoning he should've kept his mouth shut, Andy pooched out his lower lip and claimed one of the rockers by the fireplace. Peach was rolling out pie pastry on the other half of the kitchen table so he couldn't sit with his brother.

 **After putting away** a prodigious breakfast, Jess had astounded everyone by _asking_ if he could have the baby back! For almost an hour he sat quietly with bolstered arms forming a protective barrier, Lily tummy-down on his chest with her arms and legs splayed out. The child's black silky hair brushed his chin and a string of drool trickled from her open rosebud mouth down to his armpit. It was the longest anyone could recall _ever_ seeing Jess Harper sitting absolutely still!

At the dining table, Emmaline had earlier fashioned an oilskin cylinder with drawstrings at either end and was using a beeswax candle to seal the seams. Her next project would be picking open the outside seam of a pair of Jess' denims, just as Peach had done with the pajama bottoms. With ties at intervals down the open-sided leg to accommodate the cast, it would allow him to dress with an illusion of normality.

Seated opposite, Jonesy was stitching together two elderly bedsheets, Emmaline having figured out a way to solve the predicament of transporting Jess to the bathhouse with some modicum of decency. His next task would be tackling a length of flannelette, scissoring the soft off-white material into diaper-size squares.

"And when you're done with that," Emmaline remarked, "I'll show you how to do a roll-hem."

"I 'spose next you'll be wanting me to sew up baby duds!" Jonesy groused.

"Why yes..." his nemesis replied pleasantly, "As a matter of fact Mary Grace had some nice patterns for gowns and sleepers in that chest... think of it as therapeutic exercise for arthritic fingers..."

"I had a different kind of exercise in mind..." Jonesy quipped.

Emmaline rolled her eyes... surely there had to be an explanation for this spate of friskiness afflicting every man in the house. _Man-opause?_ Or just atmospheric pressure as the season turned?

 **Sally was just exiting** the back bedroom, absorbed in her own state of agitation, emotions all over the place. She'd never been so conflicted in all her life and wasn't much liking it. Since she wasn't old enough for 'the change', she wondered if she was experiencing that post-thirty mental imbalance she'd heard about... when a normally sane, rational woman starts entertaining bizarre ideas and occasionally acting on them. _This won't do at all!_ she chided herself sternly.

When she'd first gone in to check on Kim before breakfast, she'd lit the oil lamp on the dresser on the way in. Its light didn't penetrate far beyond the half-wall partitioning the front of the bedroom from the narrow back portion with the single cot and bunk bed against the wall. Kim was lying flat on his back, quilt tucked to his ears and chin. In the dark cubbyhole of the bottom bunk she could barely make out his face. She thought he was sound asleep but when she put a hand to his forehead he stirred, eyelids flickering, and mumbled something she couldn't make out except for what sounded like a woman's name...

"Kim? Are you awake?" She couldn't detect any fever. Her hand slid down to his cheek and moved to his shoulder, seeking any hot spots that might indicate infection and not finding one. A smallish dark stain in the linen bandaging represented a small amount of seepage. Probably needed changing but she decided to leave it alone. He appeared comfortable enough and was breathing evenly. Better to leave him undisturbed.

The second time she went in, he'd shifted position and was curled up in an almost fetal position on his right side, eyes open but unseeing. She sat on the cot, hands clasped between her knees.

"Hey..."

"Hey." Alertness and recognition flooded in, making his gold irises shimmer in the gloom.

"Are you back?"

"Did I go somewhere?" His voice was low and plummy.

"You might say that. Did we wake you? I'm afraid we were a little noisy at breakfast."

"No. I've been awake for a while."

"Do you remember coming in here with Jonesy a few hours ago?"

"Yeah. What time is it?"

"Does it matter?"

"No."

"How are you feeling?"

The space between the cot and bunk was narrow enough that Sally could reach over and stroke the side of his face without overreaching... and without thinking. Sliding his hand from under the quilt, he captured hers with delicacy of a butterfly alighting on a flower, turning his head to kiss her palm then turning it back and presenting a lopsided grin.

"Better now that you're here..."

She wanted to pull her hand away and at the same time leave it there forever.

"I... um... I just came in to see if you needed anything."

"No. I'm good... do you have to go right now?"

"Well... yes... pretty soon. Emma's given us all our marching orders. I drew laundry detail... again."

"Poor you..."

"Yep... poor me." Somebody's hand moved—Sally wasn't sure if it was his or hers—and suddenly both were resting against his bare chest beneath the quilt.

"What's happening out in the world?"

"Nothing much... a cold front blew in... Roop left in the dark this morning to get Young Doc, they should've been back by now. Andy's studying. Jonesy's sewing baby clothes. Jess is minding Lily..."

"Is he now?"

Sally's prattling was distracted first by the man's heartbeat reverberating through her fingertips and up her arm, then by Emmaline's voice coming from just outside the open door.

"Sally? Everything all right in there? Shall I take over so you can get to the laundry?" Her words, though mild, carried definite overtones of reproof.

"Everything's fine, Em. Be right out."

"She doesn't sound happy," Kim observed.

Sally shrugged, stealthily withdrawing her hand before it could take further liberties independently of her common sense. "Emmaline's just looking out for my welfare. She thinks I'm ridin' for a fall."

"With Slim... or with someone else?"

"No. Not with him," Sally evaded. "She knows I'll never marry him. I've made that clear..."

"Why not? _Is_ there someone else? Jess, maybe...?"

"Whatever makes you think...?"

"I've seen how you look at him..."

"Sure I look... what female could resist?" Sally smirked. "Jess Harper's a Greek god in a Stetson... he's got everything we want and then some... look at Lily—not even a week old and already she's in the sack with him!"

"Don't hold back... speak what's on your mind!"

"But it's not him either..."

"Who, then? I know you're a free agent... he told me."

"I think you already know the answer to that question..." The sarcasm hadn't been lost on her. "And I've got a question of my own... _who is Isabelle?"_

 _ **Oh shit!**_ She hadn't meant to spit that out so casually... but the female imperative had taken over her mouth and let it fly, demanding either denial or acknowledgment of a fact she already suspected. Her brother hadn't been the only one who noted the indented flesh on Kim's ring finger. She'd carried an imprint just like it for months after finally removing, shortly after starting up with Slim, the golden band she'd worn for so many years.

Kim sat up abruptly, smacking his forehead on the support railing of the upper bunk. "Owwwww!" He rubbed his head while disengaging his feet and legs from the rest of the quilt until they were sitting knee to knee and face to face, although he had to look away for a few seconds to regain his composure. For the second time, Sally found herself gazing into flat, dull eyes from which all spirit—some would say soul—had fled, leaving a shuttered mask.

"Who told you that name?" There was no hint of condemnation in his words, just a weary resignation.

"No one. You talked in your sleep when I came in earlier..."

"Oh."

A long, pregnant pause followed in which Sally thought, sadly, _He's going lie about it._

But he didn't. "Ysabel is my wife."

Sally considered that for a few moments more. "I'm sorry." _You dumb cow! Is that all you can say?_

"Me, too."

"I have to go," she said, standing up. "You sure you don't need anything?"

"Nothing. Thank you."

 **Paying no heed** to the inquiring glances thrown her way from the dining table, Sally marched to the front door and proceeded to gird herself for battle with the laundry: heavy lumberjack shirt over her own, thick winter socks inside her own brogans, an enormous striped muffler over her head and wound around her neck, and a decrepit fleece-lined toggle-and-loop parka... all of wool and all smelling deliciously of Slim, as his was the only outerwear large enough to fit her. She looked like a black-skirted sasquatch as she trooped outside to face the frigid morning.

Announcing that the big washboiler had reached optimum temperature, Feets toted the enormous pile of laundry around to the narrow side porch. Only marginally protected from the wind by the angle of the house, Sally sorted lights and coloreds. The brisk air dispelled the last vestiges of the headache which she preferred to attribute to stress rather than the aftereffects of that vile liquor she'd inadvisably imbibed the night before.

Sally was puzzled by the empty wooden barrel that had been placed next to the one filled with cold clean water for rinsing... then happily surprised when Feets and Oxtoe tottered from the forge carrying an unlikely metal gizmo with meshing gears, wooden rollers, a hand crank and u-shaped feet. It was one of those new-fangled Orin Sherman's Improved Clothes Wringers that clamped to the rim of the tub, secured by giant thumbscrews, which Sally vaguely recalled her aunt having mentioned was on order from Boston.

Where was this delightful invention a few days ago when she needed it? Oxtoe explained that the crank had broken off when it was being unloaded from the wagon last Sunday and they'd just got around to brazing it back on.

"Him verk gut now, miss!" Feets proudly proclaimed.

What a handy labor-saving device! Wringing out clothes by hand was back-breaking work and she was thrilled to be saved from that! Still, she'd be outside for hours, stirring the cauldron with a big wooden paddle, dragging laundry over into the rinse tub, fishing out items and feeding them into the mangle while cranking the handle... and when the catch tub was full, stopping to peg damp drawers and sheets on the line as they slapped her in the face. Talk about chapped hands! The good thing about all that wind was that everything would dry quickly!

At ten thirty Feets rapped on the front door to report that although they had the relay teams geared up and ready to go for forty-five minutes, there was no sign of a stagecoach approaching from either direction. Also, Roop still wasn't back. What should they do? Emmaline bade him shuck his boots to come inside and consult with Slim, who'd been kicked off the table and instructed to sit by the fire.

 **Slim was brooding.** He'd been trying to concentrate on the new _Farmer's Almanac_ , plains states' edition, but his mind kept wandering to the ever-increasing worries of how they would manage to get by this winter, with no progress being made on rounding up cattle or bringing in hay still in the field.

All he could advise the old Finn was to wait another thirty minutes then unharness the horses and turn them back out to pasture. It wasn't unusual to experience delays in the schedule but they rarely ever ran more than an hour behind, if they were coming at all. It was always possible some major crisis at a terminal at either end of the line had interrupted service.

Slim wanted Feets' prognostication on the weather... was his rheumatism predicting more rain on the way? Any chance of snow in the near future? The answers were 'possibly' and 'maybe'. Not what Slim wanted to hear. He'd already applied to Jonesy—who relied on 'sacroiliac' and 'arthuritis'—and got the same but was hoping a second opinion might prove more optimistic.

Most all the hay was already sheaved, stooked and cured—ready to be loaded onto a flat-bed wagon borrowed from a neighbor and brought under shelter. Two rainy days in one week was pushing it—any more prolonged exposure to rain and mildew would render the hay unfit for consumption by the stock although it could still be used for bedding if necessary.

Then there were the cattle—an early snow could wreak havoc on stock remaining at large on the range... not only making it difficult for them to find forage but luring predators down from the foothills where snow was already visible on the upper slopes. Wolves and coyotes and panthers could still get at them in fenced pastures, but not as easily or as often when ranchers were riding out and about, maintaining vigilance.

 **The Sherman Ranch** wasn't exactly prosperous, but it wasn't floundering either... although it had come close a few times. Four years ago, when Slim had come home for good at the conclusion of the war and his year of 'readjustment', he found the little homestead hanging by a thread... the house itself barely liveable, the barn and outbuildings falling apart, the fields fallow and overgrown, what stock remaining in such pitiful shape he couldn't give them away.

Slim could have packed up his then ten-year-old brother and turned his back on their parents' legacy... moved on and started over somewhere else. He'd been sorely tempted. But this was home and he was a stubborn man, determined to make a go of it right here. That meant acquiring a mortgage (his pa no doubt rolling in his grave!) to effect repairs and new construction and acquire breeding stock. It meant turning his back on whatever meager social life he might have enjoyed in town and working himself into exhaustion every single day of the week. Hardly an aching night went by that he didn't think of chucking it all... and might have done if it weren't for Andy and Jonesy.

That first year was touch and go but they got through it. The following year was a little bit easier. The ranch wasn't turning much of a profit but they got by, they didn't go hungry and neither did the stock. They may not've had everything they _wanted_ but they did have everything they _needed_. Slim managed to meet the mortgage payment every month, which was more than many of their _former_ neighbors had been able to do. Though loathe to capitalize on their misfortune, he nevertheless acquired parcels of adjacent land whenever he and the bank's loan officers could come to terms.

Little by little the enterprise gained acreage and momentum. Slim was starting to feel hopeful that a brighter future lay ahead for himself and his brother and Jonesy. But he never let himself become complacent or deviated from his aims—to get Andy through college, and to grow the ranch into a self-sustaining operation that he and his brother could someday pass on to their own children.

The third year—upon completion of the transcontinental railroad—brought concerns of losing the additional income provided by the hard-won stagecoach relay station contract. There'd been much talk of shutting down operations altogether, which hadn't happened yet but was only a matter of time.

In this, the fourth year, the property and the herd had expanded to a degree where a need for hired help was becoming unavoidable though Slim kept putting it off. He was neither a gambler nor risk-taker by nature, and rarely moved on impulse. It had required a gigantic leap of faith on his part when he took on Jess Harper.

 **There was a downside** to Slim's goal-oriented drive—when he made plans, he expected to follow them come hell or high water. He expected Andy and Jonesy to go along with them as well. He didn't mind the hard work or the drudgery of routine... routine was the bedrock of his orderly existence. Disruptions to it—whether caused by acts of nature or by other people—were anathema. He coped as best he could and was generally successful in restoring order. But he couldn't control _everything..._ accident, injury and illness for instance... or a teenager's raging hormones.

Slim's personal applecart had started teetering earlier this year when he'd found himself engaged in a passive-aggressive war of attrition with his sibling. Shortly after that he'd had to contend with his far from meek and biddable new hire—a man as obdurate as himself but lacking his inflexible self-control. Nothing was ever easy with the ex-gunfighter, a trouble magnet and pot-stirrer of the first magnitude. Between the two of them, Slim's cherished routines had been blown to smithereens and he hadn't enjoyed a non-disruptive day since.

Still, he'd been counting heavily on Jess' and Jonesy's participation in ranch and relay station operations to get them through this winter—and Andy's on weekends when not in school. And now all four of them were _hors d'combat._ The three elderly Koski brothers, helpful and knowledgeable though they were, wouldn't be enough to take up the slack in the next few critical weeks even after Slim himself was recovered enough to resume a normal workload. And there simply wasn't money enough to hire even one extra hand.

Bitterest gall of all was the possibility of having to pull Andy out of school (assuming school would be resuming shortly) to assist. He had his heart and mind set on the boy attending private academy in St. Louis next year, but that might have to put off if every dollar he'd been setting aside for the purpose had to be reallocated to keeping the ranch afloat.

This wasn't the first time Slim'd been sick and certainly not the worst incapacitation he'd ever endured... but the convergence of everyone else's problems on top of his own had pushed his tolerance level to the limit. As the dark cloud of resentment and depression descended on the beleaguered rancher, he found himself succumbing to the need to place the blame _somewhere_... on _someone_. He was only human, after all...

Slim vowed to himself that—in order to preserve his sanity _and_ the ranch, no matter what Young Doc had to say about it—he was going to have to be back in the saddle by the end of the week. No two ways about it.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE—PART TWO_

 **FREE WHEELIN' IT**

" _ **Semper ubi sububi sub toga"**_ _("Always wear underwear under your toga" (Roman proverb)_

 **Lunchtime arrived...** _Nurse Emma_ had wormed her way to the forefront and with Machiavellian cunning had cajoled Peach into preparing a new taste sensation for the diners: Szechuan-style hot and sour soup with crispy wonton noodles. Following her employer's instructions, the cook had made two batches—one for the invalids, containing enough Tien Tsin chili peppers to disguise any unusual additives (such as laudanum) and incidentally crackle the porcelain glaze on chamber pots on the way out, and another milder version for everyone else. The patients loved it.

Nurse Emma had plans, mind you... and wasn't inclined to twiddle her thumbs until that nephew of hers got around to making a house call. First, she needed to clear the playing field. Slim was brusquely ordered to repair to the front bedroom for the threatened nap, so that his cough wouldn't disturb the others. Andy and Jonesy were banished to the back bedroom. All three were suspiciously compliant, not even putting up a token resistance. Even Jess had ceased his nervous fidgeting. Nurse Emmawas quite pleased with her innovative method of drugging inmates into manageability without their knowledge. Kim escaped being souped into submission by remaining dead to the world and missing lunch altogether. Nurse Emmacould spare only a few moments of worry at her failure to rouse him. She was on a mission.

Feets and Oxtoe were summoned from outside to shunt furniture aside and prepare a path for the inaugural rollout of the wheelchair. Only the dining table remained in the center of the room, now elevated on risers designed by Feets—square blocks with indentations into which the table legs fit snugly—just high enough so that the wheelchair could easily slide underneath without raising the table to a height inconvenient for other users. When all was in readiness, Nurse Emma approached the curtained cubicle with Jonesy's tailoring creation in hand. It was showtime.

 **Jess warily eyed the folds** of white fabric draped over the woman's arm as she directed the Koski brothers to push the middle bed aside in order to create workspace next to Jess' bed.

"Well then, Mister Harper... are we ready to get up?" Nurse Emma with a cheerful face was enough to put the frighteners on the phantom of the opera.

"Uh... no, m'am... I mean, yes m'am... but, m'am... I ain't got no clothes." Which wasn't quite true... due to the earlier chill in the house he _was_ wearing the top half of a pair of longhandles.

"We are well aware of that fact, Mr. Harper. Your only usable item of bottomwear is at the moment in the laundry and will not be dry for a few more hours. In the meantime, we have arranged a suitable alternative that will enable you to be presentable..." She held up the bundle of white cloth and solemnly shook it out for presentation.

"Mister Harper... your toga..."

"My _what?_ "

" _Toga virilis_... ordinarily worn by Roman youth up to age eighteen, thus unadorned. Had I more time I would have added contrasting trim in Tyrian purple denoting your age and status as a member of the equestrian class. Unfortunately, we are fresh out of shellfish."

Clutching the quilt up to his chin with shaking hands, Jess stared at Nurse Emma with the panic of a small animal caught in a leghold trap and no avenue of escape. This gibberish-spouting woman was flat-out crazy if she thought he was going anywhere in a bedsheet! Only his laudanum-softened senses stopped him from opening his mouth or balling his fists to launch defensive measures.

Nurse Emma snapped her fingers and Feets and Oxtoe materialized at her side, the latter pulling the wheelchair backwards up to the foot of the bed.

"Your attendants will help you stand. They've already been instructed how to properly drape the toga. Please do cooperate." She then withdrew majestically and drew the curtain closed.

Jess' eagerness to rise from the detested bed overcame his opposition to the idea of being swaddled in bedsheets. The two Finns helped him swivel to a sitting position, between them supporting the heavy cast until it rested on the floor. They positioned themselves on either side, each putting a shoulder under an arm as a levitation aid. Instinctively trying to balance his weight on his good leg, Jess was shocked when the weakened appendage immediately crumpled, almost dragging all three to the floor. After several aborted tries he was able to remain standing with one hand on Oxtoe's shoulder to steady himself. Feets laboriously wound the makeshift toga over and around and over again the way Miss Emma'd shown him. Jess was surprised at the concealment provided by the improvised garment... even though he had reservations about wearing what seemed to him to be a woman's dress.

With much thumping, grunting, exclamations and a few bad words, Jess was ensconced in the wheelchair with his cast propped on the pull-out leg support, giddy with relief at being able to sit completely upright for the first time since Saturday morning. Oxtoe pulled the curtain aside with a flourish and Feets wheeled out the celebrant.

Okay... that was progress... now what? Jess looked to Nurse Emmafor instructions.

"First you practice rolling yourself forward," she said. "Go clockwise around the table at least ten times until you get the hang of rounding corners. Then I want you to turn completely around and go counterclockwise ten times. It won't be as easy as you think because you'll have to learn to gauge how much room you'll need to swing that leg. Then see if you can roll yourself up to the table without banging it and spilling everyone's soup."

"I can handle it!"

Jess was as gleeful as a kid with a new toy, trundling himself around the parlor with only a few minor mishaps. The genuine smile on his handsome face and obvious pleasure at being released from bed confinement was uplifting to the audience standing well out of the way or risk having their toes run over. Nurse Emmawas congratulating herself on having had the foresight to slow down his reflexes by doping his soup. Soon enough the new wore off and he was clamoring to be allowed out onto the porch for some fresh air. To his shock, she agreed.

It was time to implement Stage Two. Turning to Feets Nurse Emma inquired if all was in readiness for a limited outdoor excursion.

"Yah, miss..."

"Very well. Let's see how well Mister Harper can back up his vehicle to his bedside and retrieve his quilt... he'll need to wrap up."

Mister Harper was pleased to demonstrate how quickly he'd mastered piloting techniques. In the split second no one was looking his way, he quickly removed something else besides the quilt and sequestered it beneath the toga in a location he didn't normally keep such an item.

 **Slaving away over** the wash boiler, Sally had quickly gotten overheated so had peeled off one heavy layer of outerwear after another until she was down to the thin cotton blouse and even thinner chemise underneath. Rivers of sweat funneled down between her shoulder blades and breasts. The steady wind had plucked twists of hair from her plait which were now sticking to her wet face. The perspiration-soaked blouse and chemise were highlighting her personal contours in sharp relief.

She looked up from her labors and blinked just as the bathhouse-bound entourage came around the corner of the house on the duckboard walkway... led by a wildly gesticulating and loudly complaining blanket-wrapped Jess in the wheelchair pushed by Oxtoe with a long-suffering expression on his wizened face. Evidently at issue was Jess' desire to drive and Oxtoe's determination to deliver him where instructed, not where the rider wanted to go which, Sally surmised, was _not_ in the direction of the bathhouse. At the bottom of the ramp, Oxtoe got a running start and propelled the conveyance and its occupant up and through the canvas flaps. Hurrying close behind were Feets carrying a box and Emmaline with an armload of towels, who gave her niece a thumbs-up through the flapping laundry already on the line before they, too, vanished into the maw of the tent pavilion.

 _Soooooooooo... Jess is getting a bath?_ That certainly gave Sally pause for thought. No doubt her marvelously efficient aunt had devised some way to get him into a tub yet keep the cast dry. Sally sure would have liked to see that for herself! Wasn't gonna happen, though. She wondered if the bathee'd been informed of that beforehand or perhaps just thought he was going for walkies (or should that be rollies?). Definitely, she'd been out here too long with billows of steam poaching her brains! She tried to think of something else but her mind kept returning to whatever was happening behind the canvas walls... and wishing Nurse Emma had called for volunteers. On the other hand, _that_ probably wouldn't have been a good idea...

 **Fifteen minutes later** Sally observed another unanticipated sight... the arrival of five muddied horses and three equally muddy spotted mules loaded to the gunnels. Recognizing all but one of the riders before the pack train came to a halt in the foreyard, she strode forward to greet her brother.

"Hope y'all aren't planning on spending the night, brother... there's no room at the inn!"

"Hey Sal..." Young Doc looked tired and disgruntled as he dismounted his oversized black gelding Vulcan, identical to Sally's mare Tar Baby in breeding. The mules belonged to Fred's father-in-law, Wing Chen Li, as well as the two horses being ridden by Fred's crèchemates, Lychee McNutt and Lucky Giancomo. Roop and Lychee waved at her and kept on going up the road along with the unidentified man on what she recognized as one of her own livery rentals.

"Sorry we couldn't get here any sooner... river's flooded half the town and last night's storm washed out the road in a couple of places... no wheeled traffic's gonna be able to get through for a couple of days..."

"Thought that might be the problem... it was rising fast when I left last night..."

"About that..." Young Doc put his stern face on. "You had no business riding out here alone in the dark _and_ in a storm! Whatever possessed you to do a damnfool thing like that?!" he scolded.

"Had to."

"Had to _why?_ "

"Because..."

"Because _why?_ "

"None of your business, okay?"

Young Doc sighed and shook his head. There was just no reasoning with his ungovernable older sister. He gestured toward the three mules. "You're probably wondering what all this is about... and why the stage didn't come through today..."

"Now that you mention it..."

"There's been a rockslide at the west cut by the canyon... driver didn't see it until they were already on the rock bridge and now they're stuck... can't back up, can't turn around..."

"How come you already know about it when we're only a mile and a half away? Mose could've walked here and let us know..."

"Mose is out sick... driver's new, never took this route before. Same for the shotgun. Neither one knew for sure how far it was to the station or if the slide was passable by horseback. The shotgun—that was him, Bob something—he took one of the coach horses back through the east cut and around the south end of the canyon, then angled north cross country until he met up with the stage road... completely bypassed this place. Went straight to Ed Thornton at the stage office, Ed went to the sheriff, and Mort came to me since he already knew I was riding out here today...""

"What are you going to do?"

"There's six passengers—all women—stranded out there, plus the driver. Roop and Leetch and Bob are going ahead to see if there's a way around or through the slide on foot. If there is, we'll bring them out and they'll have to spend the night here... it'll be too late and too dark to try to get to town..."

"Fred... there's simply no room here!"

"Then they'll have to sleep in the barn." Young Doc shrugged.

"And what if there's no passage through the slide? Then what?"

"They'll come back here, collect the mules, then circle around the south end of the canyon and go back in by the east cut. We'll need to borrow some mounts from Slim if that's the case."

"As you said, it'll be too dark to travel... they'll have to camp there for the night."

"Thought of that. That's why the mules—they're carrying extra provisions—food and blankets. Some of it's for you guys..."

"Can't Overland just send another coach to fetch them back to Rock Springs?"

"We telegraphed the depot to let 'em know what happened... the earliest they can get another coach here is almost twenty-four hours. It's up to us to rescue the ladies."

Sally fumed. _Men! Everything was sooooooo simple for them... pee behind a tree, sleep on a blanket on the ground... or on a pile of hay in the barn. Leave all the domestic resolutions to the women!_

" **Lucky's gonna water** the mules and unload what stays here while I check on my patients. How about a briefing before I set foot in the dragon's lair?" Young Doc asked.

"She's not too bad today. _Nurse Emma_ paid us a visit but I think she's gone back into her cave for the present."

"Thank God for small favors!" Young Doc muttered fervently. "Look... Roop woke up the whole neighborhood at the buttcrack of dawn with a frankly preposterous story... for a minute there we thought the British were coming all over again..."

"The action was pretty much over with by the time I got here and patched up the casualties..."

Young Doc narrowed his eyes. "Nothing too serious, I take it?"

"That's for you to decide, brother."

Just then Emmaline stepped out onto the porch, hands on hips, obviously waiting for her nephew to quit palavering and get about his business.

"Come in with me?" Fred pleaded to his sister.

"No thanks. I'd rather eat a bar of soap. You go ahead. I've got laundry to finish up."


	24. Chapter 24

_CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—PART ONE_

 **DOIN' THE BATHHOUSE BOOGIE**

" _ **Just because I look like a man doesn't mean I have to smell like one."**_ _(Mulan)_

 **Meanwhile, in the bathhouse...** things were going remarkably well as Feets explained the modifications delineated by Miss Emma. A triangle with a wooden grip depended from a stout length of rope running through a pulley attached to a ceiling beam and over to a cleat on a support beam. A small wooden bench with a curved cutout hooked over the rim of the tub, supported by two sturdy legs at its other end. The odd-looking oilskin cylinder fit snugly over Jess' cast and tied around the leg where the cast ended above the knee... as long as it wasn't immersed it protected the plaster from any inadvertent splashing.

Divested of toga and longjohn shirt, grasping the trapeze handle with one hand and balancing on the rim of the big wooden tub with the other, Jess was able to step his good leg into the tub itself. Clinging to the trapeze with both hands while Feets elevated the cast to the bench, he was slowly lowered into the steaming tub by Oxtoe manning the rope. Two wide strips of canvas attached to the rim functioned as bottom and back supports so that he could extend his left leg while resting his head against the rim.

 _Sheer bliss!_

The wheelchair was parked within grab distance, with the folded up toga on the seat concealing the gun still warm from its hiding place. A bucket of water on a three-legged stool near the tub contained a long-handled dipper within Jess' easy reach for rinsing. A bench positioned close by was heaped with tin-lidded canisters and bottles of assorted bath products in addition to a basket filled with prettily packaged bar soaps foreign to Jess—Caswell-Massey's Castile Soap, A & F Pears, Colgate & Co. Aromatic Vegetable Toilet Soap and others... none of the locally-produced bricks of harsh lye soap Jonesy procured from the mercantile store in town that they used for both laundry and bathing.

As Jess slid down as far as he could into the hot water, Feets unscrewed the lid from one of the cardboard containers and dumped its granulated contents into the water. Almost instantly a froth of pink bubbles arose and foamed over the rim onto the floor.

"Hey!" Jess yipped. "Don't be puttin' none of that girly stuff in here!"

Ignoring him, Feets opened another bottle and poured it in. "Miss Emma say put batt salz in vasser for make moosel hurt go vay," he said firmly.

"What?"

"Medsin for hurts..." The old man hunched over and mimed an aching back. Jess understood then... he _had_ mentioned to _Nurse Emma_ that his back was still sore from the night before. The water started taking on an odd slickery feel... not unpleasant by any means, just different.

Feets uncapped a bottle of liquid soap and acted out pouring some into a palm and applying it to his head and scrubbing, then rinsing it off.

"Shampoose for head... mek hairs schmell gut!"

Jess pointed to an odd-looking implement—a long wooden handle with what appeared to be a big wad of dried tripe attached to it. It looked dangerous.

"What's _that?"_

Feets grinned. "Him loofah... for skroob back... here, I show..." He unwrapped one of the soap bars, an oval of pastel lavender, and dropped it in the tub where it floated. Then he mimed rubbing the bar on the dried-tripe thing and using it to scrub his back. He handed it over and Jess tried it. Once watersoaked the hard wad expanded to twice its size and Jess realized it was just a different kind of bath sponge... harder-surfaced and coarse, not soft and squishy. It sure felt good, scritching up and down his back! The soap smelled nice, too, and made a fine creamy lather in the thick terry washcloth.

Oxtoe trotted out to get more hot water and feed more logs to the fire under the second boiler. Miss Emma had informed him there were at least two more bathers scheduled after this one.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note...**_ _Well now, I surely wouldn't want you folks to get the idea Jess was a stranger to bathin' habits although it was true he didn't meet up with a_ real _bath tub until he was nigh eighteen an' fresh out of a Yankee prison camp. Took a little gettin' used to, payin' fifty cents to visit a public bathhouse an' sittin' down in a big ole tub of real hot water what came right up to his neck, with a new cake of soap an' a scrub cloth. He liked it well enough then to keep up with it every couple of months or so whenever he come across one of them establishments in a Texas border town an' had some jingle in his pocket so's he didn't have to choose between that an' bullets or food. Mostly, all them years on the drift, though, he was used to just swizzlin' off most of the dirt in whatever creek or lake was handy._

 _His attitude toward personal hygiene got readjusted once he settled in at Sherman's, however—on account of Slim flat out told him if he was gonna roost indoors with civilized Christian folks, then he was gonna have to take him a Saturday night bath just like everyone else, whether he needed one or not. So, between that an' the outdoor cold-water shower Slim'd rigged up, Jess Harper in the past five months had took more baths than in his whole prior twenty-five years. An' he'd come to appreciate that squeaky-clean fresh-all-over feelin' an' not havin' his head an' nethers itchin'. He 'specially liked when he got compliments from the gals in town on how good he smelled compared to most of their trade.)_

" **I go sauna now,"** Feets advised. "Ven joo vant come out, joo call und I comes, yah?"

"Yah... I mean, yeah... I'll call you."

The old man skinned out of his own clothes and disappeared behind the partition, releasing a blast of heat and a few minutes later a cloud of steam. Jess relaxed with the soothing heat penetrating stiff muscles unused for almost a week. The two canvas straps held him perfectly suspended so that he had use of both hands to investigate the bewildering array of fancy toiletries on the bench. One by one he picked them up and read, as best he could, labels spelling out usage and unfamiliar ingredients. He opened lids to savor the aromas that escaped—some spicy, some floral, nothing that he recognized. There was an assortment of small metal and wooden tools, the purpose of which he couldn't even begin to fathom... except for one that looked like miniature farrier's hoof nippers. Experimenting with that one, he found it served pretty much the same purpose on human fingernails and made a much neater job of it than a penknife. Apparently all this arcane stuff had come from Miss Emma's personal stores of female bathing necessities.

Oxtoe came in briefly to pour more scalding water into the tub. Jess thanked him and picked one of the smell-good canisters at random, sprinkling dark blue flakes into the bath. This time pale blue foam erupted, shimmering on the surface of the water like icing on a cake. Laying his head back and closing his eyes, Jess sighed with contentment and let his thoughts wander back to quality times spent with sweetly-scented females...

His eyes flew open as it suddenly came to him how damned few of them there'd been... maybe none. None that he could remember, anyway. Most all of his many intimate moments, though pleasurable, had been with women who'd fallen on hard times and made their way the best they could... on their backs, usually in a hurry and definitely none too sweet-smelling. In other words, not unlike himself. He'd even called himself falling in love a few times... but it was always with the wrong someone—a trend he seemed doomed to follow in the foreseeable future.

Jess tried very hard to _not_ think about last night or this morning... natural responses were... um... _natural_ , right? So why was he feeling so ashamed? Sure, he appreciated an attractive gal as much as the next man but Sally Lowenstein was about as far from what he considered 'attractive' as was possible. Too old, for one thing... and way too... everything!

And yet... and yet... he most certainly HAD noticed Sally in the side yard as Oxtoe'd whisked him along the duckwalk—cloud of dark hair loose and whipping in the wind, flushed face and flashing dark eyes, sleeves rolled up to elbows, almost translucent bodice. One muscular arm brandishing a huge wooden paddle like a weapon, she noticed him, too... he was sure. If what the other man said was true, how had Slim scored such a magnificent creature... and why was their relationship such a dadgum _secret?_ And when _did_ they get together? Slim didn't get to town all that often and when he did it was for specific purposes not including the one that Jess usually had in mind. The only extended periods of absences on Slim's part were those monthly 'buying' trips into Cheyenne beginning with the eastbound Friday evening express and ending with the Sunday night return train... with little tangible evidence of anything having been actually purchased. Of course... that had to be it! Jess congratulated himself on his superior detecting skills.

 **With a supreme effort** Jess did a mental one-eighty to an entirely different woman... his favorite, in fact, at Irish Lily's Pleasure Palace—last seen three Saturday nights ago for exactly one hour, which was all he could afford. Jess pondered if Carrie would still be available eight weeks from now when—as promised by Young Doc—he'd be up and around with a walking cast and crutches. In a position to drive himself to town if need be. It was gonna be an awful long eight weeks.

Carolina Compton was a petite blonde with cornflower blue eyes, deep dimples and a compliant nature. She was smart and bright and funny and made him laugh. Time and again she'd regretfully turned down offers to dinner and a moonlight buggy ride along the banks of the Laramie River. No sense starting something he wasn't willing to finish with a ring and a promise, she shrugged. Besides, she was saving up to buy herself a new Empire sewing machine with which she intended to start up her own seamstressing shop. Only one more year in the business and she'd have enough.

Carrie'd turned down offers aplenty from earnest cowboys with less prospects than hers and even less money in the bank (including Jess Harper). With unusual perspicacity for a woman of her age (twenty) and background (raised in an orphanage after her folks died), Miss Compton understood that marriage wouldn't elevate her social status one iota, nor would it measurably improve her standard of living. Instead, she would merely be exchanging one form of servitude for another involving a lot of hard menial labor and a passel of snot-nosed brats... and without compensation. Jess Harper had certainly been the pick of the litter, applicant-wise, but she'd nonetheless declined his attentions except as work-related. Always the gentleman, he'd accepted the repeated rejections with good grace and they'd remained good friends... and she was still his favorite. Besides, she knew he wasn't _seriously_ serious!

Submerged in his sea of tranquility, senses dulled by soporific fragrances, Jess lost track of time.

 **In the meantime...** with Feets comfortably ensconced in the sauna on the pretext of minding Jess and Roop having been co-opted to rescue stage passengers, Oxtoe quickly understood that he'd been left on his own to deal with early evening chores. He wheedled Luca Giancomo, who apparently had nothing better to do at the moment, into making the rounds with him. Not that Lucky actually _did_ anything, being totally inept at anything approaching farm chores, but he was good company. Every now and then Oxtoe would split off to deliver more hot water to the bathhouse. At that point it hadn't yet occurred to the old Finn that the much younger and considerably brawnier house bouncer at the Prairie Rose was physically better equipped to tote those heavy wooden buckets. But it would.

Sally was feeding the last bits of laundry into the mangle. The first batch to be hung was now dry and needed to be unpegged and carried indoors to make room on the lines for the next and last load. She intercepted Oxtoe to inquire who was next on the bathhouse list as she wished to reserve a slot for herself.

As they stood there talking, Lychee returned from the east to announce that a narrow boulder- and gravel-strewn corridor through the rockfall had been discovered. Roop and Bob-something the shotgun were of the opinion that the footing was too perilous for horses. The road was still too muddy for the buckboard. Therefore, the plan was to offload the three pack mules and lead them back to the mouth of the canyon along with the Sherman's two and Young Doc's and Lucky's already saddled horses. The mules would serve as mounts for five of the six female passengers. Once the ladies were safely delivered, the men would go back for their luggage.

"Where do suggest we put them, Trailblazer?" Sally asked sourly. "Shall we just stack 'em like cordwood in the barn?"

Lychee hunched his shoulders and grinned. Lord, he was a handsome devil... with a ladykiller grin that didn't faze Sally for a moment. The four of them—Fred, Lindsay, Luca and herself—had grown up together. Lindsay wasn't blood-related but had always been considered as 'cousin', same as Luca—whose predilections were apparent from a very early age. Not so Lindsay's.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note on Sally and Lindsay's Little Secret...**_ _On a mid-term visit from her boarding school, the rebellious sixteen-year-old girl had come home to find her beloved fourteen-year-old 'cousin' teetering on the brink of manhood and in a terribly conflicted state regarding his sexuality. After two and half years of the Ursulines' unremitting lectures on the maidenly virtues of chastity, purity and modesty, Sally'd had it up to here and then some. She was dead set on accomplishing at least one naughty deed during her few precious weeks of holiday freedom... and 'Cousin' Lindsay was her chosen—and willing—accomplice. After a few clandestine sessions of enthusiastic experimentation, Sally returned to school relieved of her virginity... and Lindsay was just plain relieved, now that he'd ascertained on which side of the fence he preferred to graze. Thereafter, his pet name for her was Pathfinder... and hers for him was Trailblazer. The encounter remained their secret and the nicknames a mystery to all until Sally, at the age of eighty-seven, opted for full disclosure in her journal.)_

"Not my problem, Pathfinder!" Lychee glanced toward the bathhouse, with its canvas walls now aglow from lanterns lit within even though it wasn't even near dusk. "The boys got that sauna fired up?"

"Yep... and the _ofuro_ , too... but you'll have to take a number and wait your turn. Full house tonight."

"Truer words were never spoken! Who's in there now?"

"Jess Harper."

" _Oh myyyyyyyyy_... is that a fact...?" Lychee drawled.

"Lindsay McNutt... don't you even THINK about going in there. I betcha a dollar to a bent hatpin he's got his pistol right there where he can reach it. You mess with him and your momma'll be able to use you for a colander!" Sally was laughing as she said it, stabbing him in the chest with a forefinger... but dead serious. At that point it hadn't yet occurred to the lady blacksmith that a similar strongly-worded advisement should also be issued to Cousin Lucky. But it would. And it didn't occur to Lychee to pass along the warning to Lucky. But it would.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—PART TWO_

 **INSIGHTS AND OVERSIGHTS**

" _ **The caliber of a person is not how well he prepares for everything to go right,**_

 _ **but how he stands up and moves on after everything has gone wrong."**_ _(Murali Iyengar)_

 **Inside the house** Young Doc's eyes swept the room for signs of the alleged destruction, which had been policed up though he noted the blanket-covered window, the holes in the wall and ceiling, and the absence of that wretched Currier  & Ives print and one of the six chairs usually at the dining table. As his aunt dispensed her briefing on the status of his patients he searched her face for any residual effects of the nervous breakdown and/or tantrum Roop claimed to have witnessed. She seemed perfectly composed as usual, other than a barely noticeable tic in her left eye and a very slight tremor in her hands. Young Doc commandeered the front bedroom as a private examination room, stating he'd start with the baby. Emmaline went to fetch the basket containing the infant. Little Lily was awake and alert.

"Looks fine to me," Young Doc said to his aunt. "Thriving, in fact. I guess miracles do happen. I can't imagine why this little one's escaped the plague... we've been hearing terrible reports from the reservation—they've lost almost all their elderly folks and newborns. We can't send her back there so we need to start thinking about what we're going to do with her when this is all over with."

"Good luck with that!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that Sally's already become too attached to the child. I have a feeling she won't give it up without a struggle."

"I'll talk to her about it," Young Doc promised. "Who's next?"

 **Slim's attitude-adjustment meeting** took place—but not in the manner or direction he'd anticipated. While the rancher did _look_ somewhat better, his cough had acquired that harsh, barking quality indicative of severe bronchial congestion. Before getting started with his exam, Young Doc brought Slim up to speed about the flooding, the rockfall, the stuck stage, the stranded passengers and the probability they might have to be accommodated at the ranch overnight.

Slim's face darkened. "That's all we need! How...?"

"Em and I will deal with it somehow. Now, let's listen to your chest..."

Tucking away his stethoscope, Young Doc said, "You've got a classic case of bronchitis and you won't be over it in one week or even two. You can expect continued congestion and coughing for at least two or three more weeks. No heavy work _at all_ during that period. Drink as much water as you can and rest often. Providing you do as I say, you'll be a hundred percent in a month. If you don't and you end up with lung fever, it'll be six months... or you'll be dead. Take your pick."

" _Somebody's_ gotta run the ranch," Slim insisted, swiping a hand across his face. "Your people can't stay here forever—I can't afford to pay 'em _or_ feed 'em and I don't have anyone else to help..."

Young Doc held up a hand. "I know it's probably useless to tell you not to worry... but don't worry... everything's covered for the time being. You'll still be running things but you'll have to delegate most of the physical work at least for the next four weeks."

"I don't see how..."

"Emmaline and I've got some ideas we want to float by you. What I want you to do is write down everything that needs to be done in the next two months to get ready for winter. I'll be asking the others—including Andy and the women—to do the same... plus any ideas they come up with. Then we'll hold a conference and pool everyone's notes... how does that sound?"

Slim tried to argue. "Yes... but..."

"I'm sure that by putting our heads together we can arrive at workable solutions. How about Friday afternoon? That work for you?"

"I'm not sure..."

"Splendid! There's that settled. By the way, how're you enjoying the bathhouse?"

"Well... I... er... I don't know... haven't been in it yet..." Slim admitted, thrown off course by this turnabout in their basically one-sided conversation. "That's supposed to be a bunk house, soon's I can afford the lumber and fixtures and find time to finish working on it... but I can see where a bathroom might be useful in the future."

"Indoor facilities are the coming thing out here, Slim. All new houses in the East have built-in water closets these days. A lot of us in town already have 'em installed as add-ons. Right now we're all still on well water, but the way Laramie's growing it won't be too long before we'll have city water piped right into our homes."

"Next thing you know someone'll invent some kind of reservoir for storing hot water in the house and keeping it hot," Slim hooted, "but not in our lifetime."

"What rock have you been living under? Or maybe you should start reading out-of-town newspapers more often... Sally and Em and I already have cookers with copper hot water reservoirs and piping going right to our new bathrooms... so does Lee Wing and a bunch of other forward-seeing folks. Hell... you don't even have a kitchen sink with running water yet!"

"I know... but..."

"Technology's growing by leaps and bounds these days," Young Doc said. "Get with the times! "Now... about Jess..." Young Doc drew close and lowered his voice conspiratorially. "The next three months are going to be difficult in ways you may not have considered yet..."

"Well... yeah... it'll be hard not having his help with ranch work but we'll manage somehow... we'll have to."

" **That's not what I meant, Slim.** You know Jess better than anyone else so I'm sure you agree he doesn't have the kind of temperament that's going to take kindly to confinement and inactivity..."

"You said a mouthful there, Doc!"

"I'm not too worried about his physical health—the leg will mend in due course if he doesn't abuse it—it's his state of mind that concerns me. It's important Jess be able to accomplish personal hygiene by himself. It'll be a little awkward... but doable as long as he has help when he really needs it. Other things'll be a bit trickier..."

"What other things?"

"You—all of you—need to be prepared for mood swings and the occasional temper tantrum. Before this is over he'll have spells of depression... and then he'll get angry."

"Ha!" Slim snorted. "He does that already!"

"Yes... but what does he do? He rides off on his own and hunkers down alone with his own bad thoughts until he works them out... then he comes back, right?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Except this time he can't ride off..."

"I see what you're saying."

"As his best friend, it'll be up to you to keep a close eye on the barometer... to judge when he needs attention and when he needs alone time. Now, I know you're concerned about Andy being around Jess too much and picking up bad habits... but, frankly, his company's probably going to be the best thing going for Jess in this time of durance vile."

They both chuckled at the doctor's use of the archaic term. "He might be tempted to take out his frustrations on other adults but he'd never lash out at Andy. So maybe you could relax your vigilance a little... be a little less strict...just while Jess is recuperating... let them spend as much time together as Jess needs?"

"I understand what you mean," Slim sighed, "but I don't want Andy falling behind on his studies or using this as an excuse to get out of doing chores. And I don't have time to babysit a grown man."

"I know that, Slim... and I'm not expecting you to do that... I'm just asking for an extra measure of patience on your part."

"I'll try, Fred... that's the best I can promise... but Jess can try the patience of a saint, even on his best days. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to cope with two teenagers... or one kid and a half-broke colt."

"I hear you." Young Doc nodded in sympathy. "Now... about that bump on your noggin..."

Slim put a hand up to the goose egg slightly off-center of his forehead. "I... uh... I just tripped over something... wasn't looking where I was going."

"Is that a fact?"

"It's nothing... really. Not a problem..."

"In my professional opinion, if you slam your head hard enough to knock yourself out, that constitutes a problem. Any dizziness, double vision?"

"No... nothing like that... I'm telling you, I'm fine..."

"Sally said you were out at least five minutes."

"Sally has a big mouth."

Young Doc sighed. "Well, let's see what we can do about loosening up some of that congestion. Since the sauna's already fired up, I want you to go sit in it for thirty minutes..."

"Right now?"

"Why not? Do you have anything better to do?"

"No... I guess not."

"Then go. I'll check you afterwards and we'll see if that helps."

"Okay... if you insist."

"And wear a jacket!"

"Yes, mom..."

"Would you mind sending Andy in on your way out?" Slim was dismissed.

 **Though the rash was still** in full spate, Andy's other symptoms were considerably improved. Young Doc advised he could expect to start feeling better toward the end of the week and the rash would be mostly gone by the end of the following week. "Let me see your foot."

Andy winced a little during the inspection.

"Nice clean cut. Closing up already. Keep it wrapped up and clean and dry for a few days and it'll be fine. Now, let's you and I get down to brass tacks about how things are going to have to be run around here for next couple of weeks..."

Andy was all ears. "Sir?"

"I know you know of families around here who lost their fathers during the war... and boys not much older than you had to step up and become man of the house. That's not exactly the case here but—since you'll be the first to recover—you'll have to be your brother's eyes and ears and right-hand man for a while... until he's well enough to go out and do things for himself. Not this week... but maybe starting next week... you'll have to do walk-arounds every day and report back to him any little thing you see that needs attention. Understand?"

"Yes sir!"

"That doesn't mean _you_ get to order anyone around, though... you just relay your observations to Slim and he'll make decisions and give the orders. It'd probably be a good idea to ask for opinions, too. Among them, the Koskis have about a hundred and fifty years of ranch experience so they're pretty reliable if you have a question. Any suggestions they offer are well worth listening to. You follow me so far?"

"Yes sir!"

"One thing you _can't_ do is abandon your schoolwork... so here's what I want you to do when you go back out there... make up a schedule for yourself including hours set aside for studying. If you have any questions, write 'em down."

"What about reading to Jonesy and Jess?"

"You can still do that whenever you have time... with winter coming on you'll have plenty of rain or snow days where you have to stay indoors anyway. Another thing... there'll have to be some trading around of chores, too... if Jess takes over some of yours that you normally do sitting down, then you'll have to take over any of his that require standing up. Okay?"

"Okay, yessir."

"I know it's asking a lot but you're almost a grown man now, Andy... and as smart as your brother. I don't think Slim even realizes himself how much he relies on you..."

"I sure wish you'd tell _him_ that!"

"I intend to. Now, we're having a meeting Friday afternoon to coordinate activities. As part owner of this spread, your participation is important. I'd like you to be prepared to take notes and share any ideas."

"Yessir... I'll be ready!"

"Good man! Now scoot and send Jonesy in here."

Andy strutted out with his head held high, proud and pleased that finally an adult had acknowledged out loud something that he'd been thinking about a lot more often lately—that technically he was half-owner of this ranch. If only the _other_ people who lived here—especially his brother—would recognize that fact, respect _his_ rights and ask _his_ opinion every now and again!

 **Jonesy stalked in,** claiming he was fit as a fiddle and ready to regain control of his kitchen. Young Doc cautioned him about not getting too cocky too soon. "Three days do not a week make... and when I said bed rest for one week, that was exactly what I meant!"

"But..."

"No buts... Are you using the pillows like I said?"

"Yes... but..."

"Let's see you bend over and touch your toes, keeping your legs straight."

Jonesy couldn't quite get there without letting a little groan escape.

"When you can do that without pain or hesitation, we'll talk."

"I don't need to touch my toes to cook, Freddy!"

"Pick up that black bag there... one hand only."

Jonesy couldn't do it without wincing... or twist his torso or hold his arms straight over his head without grimacing.

"Congratulations... you've just done your stretching and bending exercises for the day."

"My what?"

"I want you to continue doing that two to three times a day... gently... and only for a few minutes at a time, to strengthen your back muscles. It won't cure your bad back but it'll help prevent flareups. My best advice to you from here on out is, if you can't lift something with one hand, you have no business lifting it at all. Which reminds me... that big cast iron frying pan... the one you could sauté a side of beef in? Get rid of it! Get two smaller ones."

"But that's my favorite skillet!"

"I've said my piece. I'm happy you're feeling better but I still want you back in bed until the end of the week. How did you like the hot tub?"

Jonesy had to admit it had felt really good, as well as the back massage he'd got afterwards from Peach.

"Yep... she's got good, strong hands. Keep on with that then... and use plenty of Epsom salts."

Jonesy was provided with instructions to list everything he normally did on a daily, weekly or monthly basis so he'd be ready for the conference.

"Out you go... and send Kim in next."

"Uh... he's still asleep... in the back bedroom, where it's quiet."

"If the mountain won't come to Mohammad..." Young Doc lumbered to his feet and hoisted his black bag.

 **The parlor was a maelstrom** of activity, underscored by a tremendous amount of clashing and banging in the kitchen and, on Peach's part, intermittent screeches of indignation in Cantonese at the prospect of having to feed eleven extra mouths on practically no notice. Sally had just come in with the first armload of dried laundry, looking around in vain for a place to dump it. Jonesy and Andy were immediately co-opted to peel potatoes, scrape carrots and chop onions. Emmaline was tacking sheets of elderly but still serviceable oil paper to the currently glassless frame of the front window, which would have to do until replacement panes could be obtained in town. Young Doc prudently removed himself to the back bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him.

From her position conveniently near the door through which Lucky and Oxtoe were bringing in supplies offloaded from the spotted mules, Emmaline directed traffic and dispensed orders.

"Oxtoe... as soon as you're done I need you and Feets to go to the barn right away and clear out three stalls. Our incoming guests will have to sleep there tonight."

"Feets bissy now, miss... und stalse full uff horsus..."

"Yes, yes... I know that. Turn them into the corral or the pasture for the night. They'll survive. Luca can trade places with Feets..." It didn't occur to Emmaline that—except for Lychee who wasn't there—her son was probably the worst possible choice for this assignment. But it would.

"Whadever joo say, miss..."

"Hop to it, then... and make sure those stalls are _really_ clean! Lots of fresh hay, if you please. As soon as Roop gets back, make him help you..."

"Yah, miss..."

"Sally... stop by the bath house and tell Feets to come out of there... he's needed elsewhere. Luca's almost done here. I'll send him back in just a minute or two."

"Will do, Auntie Em." Sally swung toward the door... grateful that the end of laundry was in sight—for today, anyway. It didn't occur to her that Lucky could be tempted into forgetting his closeted status and saying or doing something to cause alarm in the not-dumb but in certain respects naive bather. But it would.

 **In the bathhouse,** Feets was still happily steaming himself like a clam behind the partition. Jess was still luxuriating in the tub and cheerily chatting with his just-arrived partner as the latter stripped down and wrapped a towel around his waist before joining the elderly Finn in the sauna.

 **At the canyon entrance,** Lychee arrived with the five mules and two extra horses to find Roop at the head of a crocodile wending its way on foot through the rubble with Bob the shotgun and the driver (whose name was also Bob, as it happened) walking drag. It transpired that the six female passengers had decided a bit of exercise wouldn't hurt them and had elected to walk up instead of wait. Lychee was chortling to himself at the one small detail concerning the six women that he'd neglected to mention earlier.

 **Somewhere above the clouds** the gods of chance and fortune—occupying front row seats on the pinnacle of the Wyoming equivalent of Mount Olympus—were clinking their goblets together and settling in to enjoy the fun to come...


	25. Chapter 25

_CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—PART ONE_

 **MYSTERIOUS WAYS**

 _"_ _ **God moves in a mysterious way... His wonders to perform..."**_ (William Cowper, 1773)

 **When Mother Superior Moira Bartholomew** received that telegram last Saturday from her closest friend in the sisterhood network, she'd taken it as a Sign from Above that the time was ripe to escape the stultifyingly chauvinistic thumbs of the Jesuit brothers running the mission at the Flathead Reservation near St. Ignatius. Wasting not a moment, the Reverend Mother gathered together her reduced flock of followers, informing them that effective immediately they were relocating from western Montana to southeastern Wyoming. Without further ado, the six Sisters of the Divine Illumination collected their meager possessions, hopped the last stagecoach out of town and were well on their way south before sundown.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's notes...**_ _History's only just now ownin' up to the contributions these females made to the civilization of the High Plains and it's about damned time. Fact was, Catholic missions was established in good faith—no pun intended—by_ men _what soon found out what a drag it was without no women to cook their meals, wash their undies, darn their socks and nurse their ailments. Fact was, the male organizations had all the money and the motherhouses didn't, so nuns was invited to come out West to help spread The Word and—incidentally—take care a the cookin', washin', sewin', mendin', gardenin' , nursin' and any other chores them priests and brothers didn't see fit to do for themselves... in return for which the fatherhouses or whatever they called themselves provided shelter and supplies. Most of them orders went along with that program all right, but others like the Reverend Mother's outfit didn't think too highly of always playin' second fiddle in the orchestra and figured they could do just as good if not better when it come to ministerin' to the poor and the sick and educatin' heathen young 'uns.)_

 **Along the way,** the Reverend Mother outlined their two-fold purpose to her Dominican Sisters: Their immediate task was rendering aid and assistance to the plague-stricken town of Laramie. Sixteen of their Carmelite counterparts were already _in situ_ but more help was urgently needed—especially on the nearby Horse Creek Sioux Reservation.

A more important consideration—once the measles epidemic was whupped—was the establishment of their own independent convent in a frontier town that didn't already have one. The Little Sisters of Perpetual Desolation under Mother Superior Mary Appassionata would eventually be returning to their Carmelite convent in Cheyenne. The two _religieux_ had maintained a voluminous correspondence since their initial training together. Aware of her friend's disgruntlement with matters at St. Ignatius, the Reverend Mother Mary had been for some time proposing that Laramie would be a splendid place to resettle... it already had a Catholic presence in two fairly prosperous urban congregations within the Diocese of Cheyenne.

But... there was a third, struggling parish that needed all the help it could get. Catering to natives and cast-offs of society, Our Lady of the Prairie was run by a Father Sean Padraic Cormac Flynn, who'd managed to blot his copybook somewhere along the line and been banished to the back of beyond. Its holdings presently consisted of a dilapidated chapel converted from a sheepshed and a one-room shack that served as rectory, occupying a prime parcel of riverfront property some five miles north of town—ripe for development if investment capital were made available. The Reverend Mother Mary intimated that a private loan could be arranged with the Carmelites, whose coffers at present overflowed with funds accruing from their highly-sought-after private female seminary in Cheyenne. The telegram was the clincher in a series of negotiations. _'ALL IN PLACE. COME NOW IF READY'._ _Were they ready? Did Peter walk on the sea before being saved?_

Which is how Mother Superior Moira Bartholomew came to be heading west on a rutted road on a windy day in Wyoming. The handsome part-Oriental identifying himself as Lindsay McNutt had assigned her a gigantic black gelding—the tallest saddle horse she'd ever met—and confronted the problem of getting her up there by gripping her firmly by the waist and hoisting her up to the saddle—a decidedly titillating experience! Ahead of her rode the old codger with the foreign accent, Roop, dwarfed by a black mare as big as her mount. Every so often she glanced around to check on her girls, riding single file on the mules—the two professed Sisters, Bertha John and Harriet Simon; the two novitiates, Sisters Phoebe Luke and Florence Matthew; and the one postulant, Lucy John.

 **The Reverend Mother was all about** practicality and comfort. The traditional multi-layered heavy black woolen uniform was fine in its place, such as when the bishop came to visit—necessitating a semblance of conformity to the dress code and an obsequious display of piety. Aside from that, these were working Sisters in every sense of the word. They toiled outdoors in all seasons and needed to be able to perform without the restrictions of traditional garb. All six women wore simplified tunics of lightweight but durable wool serge in a potato-brown color with matching scapulars. The sleeves and unbleached cotton underskirts were single, rather than double. Their heads were covered by narrow white coifs and bandeaus with short brown veils, leaving their cheeks and necks exposed. In the heat of summer they often went without the scapulars and headgear, wearing instead only belted cotton tunics with capacious pocketed aprons and hair mostly concealed beneath crepe scarves tied at the nape of the neck. They wore the same sturdy high-top lace-up brogans as farmwives wore.

All six women rode astride with their skirts bunched up to their knees. Father Julius back at St. Ignatius would have been mortified at the extent of lower limb exposure but the Reverend Mother wasn't concerned, seeing as how all extremities were solidly encased in longjohn leggings under layers of sensible bloomers as an added precaution.

Bringing up the rear, along with Mister McNutt on his own equally impressive black horse, were Bob the shotgun on a normal-size borrowed animal—not the coach horse he'd left on—and Bob the driver on yet another oversize black horse. The Reverend Mother—née Moira Hanrahan of the Baltimore County Hanrahans—had been born and raised on a Maryland thoroughbred farm and had a keen eye for superior horseflesh, not to mention a superb seat at the foxhunt and point-to-point. Somewhere around here a canny breeder was making money hand over fist and someone else was making a mint supplying feed for these larger-than-life ponies!

 **Mister McNutt pulled up alongside her,** apologizing for the delay in getting them to their temporary destination. "It's the mud... tough going even for these guys." He patted his mount's neck affectionately. "It'll only be a few more minutes. The ladies are expecting you so hopefully dinner will be ready... or almost ready."

"I'm the one who should apologize. This is a terrible imposition on the lady of the house..." the Reverend Mother said. "We're most appreciative that we're not spending the night sitting up in the stagecoach, however."

"There's not exactly a lady of the house... the Shermans have experienced an unusual spot of bother this week, so Missus Giancomo and her niece, Missus Lowenstein are there to help out, along with Missus Giancomo's cook, Missus McNutt... who happens to be my mother. She's Chinese, in case you're wondering."

"Well... I was but it would have been rude to ask... but if I may ask, how many people are there in the Sherman family?"

"Just Slim—his real name's Matthew—and his brother Andy. They own the ranch and run the station along with Jonesy and Jess, who aren't related. I guess you could call them hired hands but they're more like family. Other folks are just helping out temporarily—the Koski brothers... Feets, Oxtoe and Roop up there—they're from Finland, originally."

"My... how interesting!"

"Then there's Luca Giancomo, Missus Giancomo's son, and Doctor Whatleigh, her nephew and Missus Lowenstein's brother. Oh... and there's one other man, Kim... he's sort of a houseguest."

"Is he also Oriental? I mean, with a name like that..."

Mister McNutt shrugged. "Could be. Or not. Claim's he's Indian but the jury's still out. I'm fairly certain he's actually a Pacific Islander."

"My goodness... an international alliance of nations right here in deepest, darkest Wyoming! Who would have guessed?!" the Reverend Mother quipped. "Must be a very _large_ domicile, housing all those people."

"Actually... no... it's very small and right now very crowded."

"Perhaps we should push on towards town...?" the Reverend Mother observed doubtfully.

"Out of the question, m'am... it'll be dark soon and there's flooding between here and there."

"How did you get here then, if a wagon can't?"

"We came by horseback, m'am. Had to circle around to where we knew we could ford without having to swim the pack mules... took us double the miles. That's why we were somewhat tardy coming to your rescue."

"Is food going to be a problem? We wouldn't want to deprive anyone..."

"Not at all... they've got enough stockpiled to withstand the Siege of Troy... and we brought in some more. Don't you worry, I'm sure Missus Giancomo and Miss Sally—that's Missus Lowenstein—have figured out a way to make everyone comfortable." In fact, Lychee knew no such thing but it seemed the right thing to say.

"I don't wish to pry, Mister McNutt, but have these people been overtaken by some sort of calamity?"

"Please... call me 'Lychee'... everyone else does. Yes, m'am, you might say they've been recently visited by a veritable panoply of calamities."

Having already ascertained she was dealing with an educated and cultured individual, the Reverend Mother was nevertheless duly impressed. "Really? Do tell!"

"Well... let's see... we've got a fractured leg, a concussion, some broken ribs, a gunshot wound, measles, an osteopathic condition which may or may not be work-related, bronchitis, another concussion... it's a litigator's wet dr... oops... sorry, m'am!" Lychee blushed deeply.

"I'm familiar with the expression, Mister... uh, Lychee," the Reverend Mother said drily. "Don't tell me... let me guess... you're an attorney."

"Guilty as charged!"

"What's your specialization?"

"Out here we don't have the liberty of specializing in any one particular aspect, m'am... you pretty much take what you can get."

"Corporate and real estate?"

"Yes, m'am."

"Good. I... we... will be in need of your services shortly."

"Certainly. It would be an honor to render any assistance required." Offhand Lychee couldn't think of a single thing a nun might need help with. But one never knew.

" **Are you a Buddhist, Mister Lychee?"**

 _Oh noes!_ Lychee hadn't seen this one coming and it would be impolite to spur his horse out of proselytization reach!

"Oh... er... no, m'am... I'm... uh... unprofessed, I guess you'd say."

"Pity. I've never met one before and I was hoping for some insightful theological discussions over tea."

"My mother keeps to the old ways... you might want to check with her."

"She speaks English?"

"Sort of." _On second thought... considering every other word out of his mother's mouth was a blue one..._

"Splendid!" the Reverend Mother beamed. "Looking forward to a nice chat, then!"

Lindsay 'Lychee' McNutt—son of Chen Chuntao (aka 'Spring Peach'), former prostitute, and Archibald McNutt, former sailor and deceased gold miner—groaned inwardly.

"How long do you think before the flood subsides enough that we can get to Laramie?" the Reverend Mother inquired.

"Two, maybe three days."

 **Moira Aislin Hanrahan,** now known as Mother Superior Moira Bartholomew, possessed a pragmatic outlook on life paralleling that of Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo, whom she was soon to encounter. Already her mind was skipping forward to dwell on the realities of a ranch populated by a gaggle of helpless, indisposed males being looked after by a trio of no doubt overworked and harried women. Pretty much the same situation as she and her followers had just extricated themselves from, except _their_ helpless men had been Jesuit priests.

"Who's minding the ranch and doing the chores if all the menfolk are down and out?"

"Not all..." Lychee replied. "That's why the Koskis were brought in... they're all three hale and healthy as oxen, but... they _are_ in their late seventies or early eighties so it's a bit much for them... Young Doc asked Lucky and me if we could pitch in for a few days..."

"And Lucky would be...?"

"Luca Giancomo... my... uh... associate. We share the third-floor apartment in his mother's home."

"Lucky is also a lawyer?"

"Um... no... he's a painter... art paintings, not houses. And a bouncer at his mother's place of business."

"His mother has a business that requires a strong-arm man?" The unasked portion of that query dangled in the breeze.

Lychee gritted his teeth as his boots sunk ever deeper in the pit of effluvium he'd just dug for himself. "Missus Giancomo is a nurse... but she also owns a... a... social service... more of a gentlemen's private club, quite dignified, I assure you."

"Yes. I can well imagine," the Reverend Mother replied drily. "So you're saying none of the other men are able to do any ranch work at the present time?"

"Not yet, no."

"Isn't it fortuitous that there won't be any stage runs until the roadway's cleared?"

"Yes, m'am. There _is_ that. A blessing in disguise. But the biggest problem is that the Shermans haven't got their range cattle into winter pasture yet. The Koskis were supposed to be doing that but Aunt Emma's keeping 'em on the run with chores around the ranch."

"Aunt Emma?"

"Lucky's mother... Missus Giancomo... she's not really my aunt but I think of her that way. Her name's Emmaline. My mother—Peach—has been her cook and housekeeper ever since I was born. Lucky and I and Fred and Sally all grew up together in her house."

"Fred? Sally?"

"Doctor Wilfred Whatleigh... his daddy was Doctor Alfred Whatleigh, Aunt Emma's brother... so he goes by Young Doc. His wife is Mingzhu but we call her 'Pearl'. I work for her father, Wing Chen Li, except he's known as Lee Wing."

"I thought you were an attorney?"

"I am. I'm his corporate attorney. Also his _compradore_."

"Do I even want to know what that entails? Does it involve... um... violence?"

"Occasionally, when intimidation fails. I do civilian work on the side, though."

"So you and your... _associate_... are guest cowboys for the weekend? Frankly, you don't much _look_ like a cowboy," the Reverend Mother chuckled.

"I'm not... we're not. The idea is to free up the Finns so _they_ can round up cattle. Except neither of us has ever milked a cow or fed chickens in our lives so I don't know what use Fred expects us to be around here."

Not for nothing were the Reverend Mother and her brood called 'Sisters of the Divine Illumination'... and the Reverend Mother right then experienced a big one.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary...**_ _In her youth, Moira Aislin had been the only girl among the six boistrous sons of the horse-crazy lace-curtain Hanrahans. Shortly after graduating college [incidentally the same alma mater of one Emmaline Whatleigh], Moira had embroiled herself in an ill-advised love affair with disastrous consequences. To spare herself and her family shame and as was accepted procedure in those days, the unwed mother-to-be had immured herself in a convent specializing in those unhappy situations. There she'd met and mingled with other fallen women from all strata of society... and there she'd found her vocation. The infant had been adopted out, naturally._

 _Although Moira'd been called to the veil somewhat later in life than the five young women currently in her charge, her devotion and commitment to her faith was no less than theirs. She firmly believed that God had a reason and a plan for everything. Had He not intended her life to be spent in servitude to those less fortunate instead of playing bejeweled hostess at her family's innumerable soirées and hunt balls, there would have been no lover and no unintended pregnancy. Had He not intended her to relocate to Laramie, there would have been no epidemiological outbreak there nor a failing parish in need of bolstering. And had He intended that the Sisters get there sooner, there would have been no road blockage or flooding to impede progress. Clearly, the only interpretation of the_ status quo _was that they were_ meant _to be here... at this place and at this time... to employ their skills and knowledge, hearts and hands in restoring health and stability to the unfortunates on this particular ranch. [Amen])_

 **The roof of the barn** and a wisp of smoke from a chimney were just coming into sight.

"Who's running this shebang?" Mother Superior Moira Bartholomew demanded with asperity.

"Depends on whom you ask," Lychee grinned. "Young Doc thinks he's calling the tune and Emmaline's playing the fiddle... but I'm sure she thinks it's the other way around. Guess we won't know 'til we get there which one's got the whip hand today."

"Well... when we _do_ get there, take me to your leader... whichever one it is."

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—PART TWO_

 **COMPROMISING POSITIONS**

" _ **In any particular situation, if three things can go wrong, they usually do so**_

 _ **in sequence, each facilitating the occurrence of the next."**_ _(Takura Razemba)_

J **ess had been lounging** in the _ofuro_ for quite a while now, partly listening to his partner hoicking up hairballs in the sauna behind the partition, but mostly playing with the rapidly dwindling supply of bath products. Adding a splash of this and a dribble of that. Marveling at the pearlescent sheen of bubbles. Capturing a shimmering translucent orb in the palm of his hand and blowing it into the air, watching it float majestically away. Wishing he had something with which to scrape away two days' worth of beard.

It was coming to his attention that the water wasn't near as hot as he'd enjoyed earlier. Come to think of it, Oxtoe hadn't been in with a refresher bucket for a while. He was just about to open his mouth and call out to Feets when that worthy appeared through the doubled canvas panels to the sauna and started washing himself off.

"Hey Feets... when you're done could you get me some more hot water?"

"Time joo comes out so's Meester Slim gets he tourn, yah? Him gone to schleeps in dere!"

Jess then realized he hadn't heard any coughing in the past few minutes. "Yeah... I guess so." He resisted yielding to the faint cramp developing in his right hip whenever he tried to shift a little from his semi-reclining position.

"I dress den I hepp joo, yah?" The little man was pouring dippers of cold clear water over himself to chase the soapsuds towards the drain hole in the floor while Jess politely looked away.

They were both startled by Sally's voice right outside the flap door. "Feets? You in there still?"

"Yah miss..."

"Miss Emma wants you to get dressed and go help Oxtoe clean out two stalls in the barn for those women..."

"Commink! First get Meester Jess out uff wasser, yah?"

"What women?" Jess wanted to know...

"No... she's sending Lucky in there to do that... those stalls need cleaning pronto!"

" _What_ women?" Jess repeated, a little more loudly.

"Okay alride alreddy... I commink!"

"Is Slim in there?"

"Yah, miss. He schleep."

"In the sauna? Well... never mind. Leave him be. Look... you tell Lucky as soon as he's got Jess dressed and back in the wheelchair, fill up the washboiler again, okay? And after he brings Jess indoors he'll need to add hot water to the tub and wake Slim up so he can get in it. Got that?"

"Yah, miss... goddit!"

" _WHAT WOMEN?"_ Jess yelped.

"No need to yell... I'm right here. The six women from the stage."

"I didn't hear no stage pull up!"

"That's because it's stuck in the bottom of the canyon. Lychee and Roop went to rescue them. They'll be spending the night here. Should be here any minute."

" _I'M IN THE BATH DAMMIT!"_

"Why are you hollering? They're not going in there."

"I ain't comin' out in no bedsheet where six strange females are gonna see me!"

"Suit yourself. Bedsheet or birthday suit... not my problem."

" _HEY! THAT AIN'T NICE!"_

 **All this yelling had been accompanied** by a good deal of agitated flailing. Water was pooling on the floor faster than it could run out the drain. In fact, every time Oxtoe had poured in a new bucketload he hadn't bothered to pop the bung and let the water level down first, reasoning that the overflow would eventually find its own conduit out. The dry floorboards, having absorbed as much moisture as they could, were sodden and slimy with additional waves of soapy water going nowhere fast. Bubble domes glistened everywhere.

Feets popped his galluses over his shoulders, picked up his boots and socks and gingerly sidled across the treacherous footing toward the door flap.

" _HEY... YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME LIKE THIS!"_ Jess hollered after him, getting no response. ' _WHAT ABOUT MY HOT WATER?!"_

Understanding after a few seconds that he'd been abandoned by both Feets and Sally, Jess returned his attention to the bath products. A moderately-sized but delicately fashioned blue glass bottle he'd overlooked earlier bore a label announcing that _'Aquae Sulis'—Created Exclusively By Appointment for Her Majesty, Queen Alexandrina Victoria_ contained genuine Roman essential oils of bay laurel, fir, pine and juniper. Smelled just like tall timber in high summer... a scent he particularly enjoyed. Thinking _what the hell_ , he upended the entire bottle in the water and awaited results.

 **In the meantime...** Sally was coming in the front door with another pile of dry laundry. The fainting couch was heaped to the windowsill... again. Peach was screeching at her skivvies—Jonesy and Andy—they weren't peeling, scraping and chopping fast enough. Emmaline was berating Lucky for not carrying out her instructions quickly enough. Young Doc came blasting out of the back bedroom escorting a stumbling, dazed-looking Kim by the upper arm with one hand and brandishing a handful of blood-soaked wrappings in the other. The good doctor was livid. He paused to let the full black pall of his displeasure fall on the troupe staring back at him from various vantage points. Everyone stopped breathing, feeling their collective hearts skip a beat or two. A six-foot six-inch three-hundred-pound man in a rage does tend to garner notice.

" _WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT'S HOLY DO YOU CALL THIS?"_ Young Doc pulled out a chair at the head of the dining table and deposited Kim in it. The bloody bindings were what had been holding the bandage in place. The bandage itself was firmly stuck to the wound with congealed blood.

"Peach... get me two bowls of warm water... NOW!" Young Doc roared. "Emmaline... go get my bag... I left it in the bedroom." Both women scattered.

"You..." Young Doc pointed a threatening finger at his sister. "Roop says you're the one took care of this... why the hell hasn't this dressing been changed?!"

Sally blinked rapidly and marshaled her courage. "Because it didn't need it this morning and he was sleeping the next time I looked. He seemed all right around lunchtime... lucid, anyway. We talked a little."

" _Lunchtime?_ That was four or five hours ago! No one's checked on him since?"

Sally threw up her hands. "Fred... I'm sorry. I guess I assumed Em would take care of it."

"You _assumed?!"_ Young Doc fumed as Emmaline put the bag on the table and hurriedly backed away. He rummaged for the ever-present bottle of carbolic as Peach hurriedly thrust forward the requested bowls and scampered back to the safety of the kitchen.

"Get me some more bandages and a clean hand towel," Young Doc barked, washing his hands.

Sally wordlessly put down her load of laundry and fetched both items, looking down at the top of Kim's head. "Kim?"

He was gazing at something only he could see and not responding vocally. She put a hand against his cheek, eliciting no physical response. She moved around to the other side of the table and stood directly in his line of sight. He looked right through her.

"What are you going to do?" she asked her brother.

Folding the towel into quarters, Young Doc immersed the bundle in carbolic and warm water then wrung it out and laid it over the glutinous bandage. Kim flinched almost imperceptibly. "First I have to soak this off. Then I'll check for infection and decide if the wound needs suturing. Peach... I'm probably going to need some boiling water in a saucepan as well."

"What's do you think's wrong with him... other than being shot, I mean?"

"I was hoping you'd tell me... but now's not the time. He appears to be in a fugue state—the lights are on but nobody's home."

"He was like this last night... you know... afterwards. Slim and Jess thought it was some kind of delayed shock like soldiers got in the war. They said the best thing was to leave him alone and he'd come out of it on his own..."

Young Doc snorted. Removing the pink-stained towel, he was able to lift away the gauze pad without any adhesion to the raw edges of the wound. "With all respect to Doctors Sherman and Harper's expertise, next time, Sally, use your own common sense. You could have stitched this up yourself in no time."

"What about the other...?"

"Slim and Jess are probably right about that... it's a form of psychogenic non-epileptic seizure that typically resolves itself within twenty-four hours so it's too soon to worry. We really don't know much about this sort of condition yet." His tone was a shade more kindly. "Go on back to your laundry for the time being."

"If you don't need me..."

Young Doc had already moved on. "Peach! Bring me that boiling water... and I need coffee... with cream and sugar and brandy in that order."

Sally watched while he unrolled the padded pouch containing suture needles, made his selections and dropped them in the pan along with skeins of silk suture thread, forceps and needle holder.

Doc looked up. "Sally... just go, if you please... I don't want him moving while I'm sewing him up and you're only going to distract him with those bazooms in his face...!"

Emmaline had ceased her window dressing and turned around to observe the goings-on at the dining table, thus not noticing Lucky standing motionless just inside the front door. Mouth agape, the man cradled a forty-pound cotton sack of dried marrow beans in his arms and had an expression on his face not unlike a puppy eyeing an especially enticing chew toy just out of reach—only partially due to his natural attraction to the cute-as-a-bunny half-clothed figure on the chair. His artistic side was admiring the fading bruises decorating the other's torso—a free-form collage of pastel greens, yellows, lavenders and greys.

Sally had to duck around him to reach the exit. "Excuse me, cousin..."

Alerted to Lucky's presence, Emmaline turned and marched over to where her son was transfixed in contemplative rapture, shouting "What are you still doing here?!" When he didn't answer she reached over and smartly boxed both ears. "Did I not just give you an order?"

Lucky shrieked and dropped the sack in order to free both hands to protect his ears from further abuse, then pivoted on his heels and ran out the door. Forty pounds of dried beans burst forth from the ruptured sack, bouncing and skittering like marbles in all directions.

Needle and thread poised in mid-air, Young Doc glimpsed both his aunt rolling out the door, screaming like a banshee, and the tidal wave of beans advancing toward the center of the parlor. When he looked down his patient was no longer sitting upright but had his head down on cradled arms, shoulders heaving convulsively. Kim was laughing so hard he could only emit strangulated wheezes.

 **Approaching the staging yard** from the west, the cavalcade of horses and mules halted in plain sight of the barn and house. Lychee was requesting that the ladies remain mounted until the men dismounted and moved forward to assist them off their beasts. If they would kindly proceed one by one in an orderly fashion up to the bottom of the porch steps, the disembarking could take place with no religious foot need touching mud. He signaled for them to move forward.

Mother Superior Moira Bartholomew at this point observed a rather tall dark-haired woman striding out the front door and around the corner of the house to where an extraordinary amount of laundry flapped in the wind. Right behind her a very large dark-haired man burst through the same door and ran around the same corner, almost knocking over the tall woman who leaped to get out of the way. Hands cupped to his ears, he was howling in an unmanly manner. Directly behind him another extremely large woman with a grey corona charged out, screeching in a decidedly unladylike fashion. She seemed to be slipping on something on the porch floor. When she banked into a turn she kept sliding until she hit the porch railing and flipped over into the rose bushes, longhandled legs kicking in the air.

The procession instantly came to another halt. From their elevated perches on mule- and horseback, the six Sisters of the Divine Illumination looked on with undisguised interest over the lines of laundry as the tall dark man with the ear problem scuttled along the duckwalk, up a ramp and into a peculiar canvas tentlike structure, vanishing between the door flaps.

The Reverend Mother turned to Lychee. "You didn't mention the carnival was in town. How delightful!"

 **Jess by now was slightly chilled** and more than slightly bored. He'd run through all the containers and bottles of additives and started on the bath soaps. Each one smelled different. Some floated, some didn't. A few had squirted out of his hands and were distributed on the floor, each now nesting in its own puddle of gelatinous goo. There was still so much foam in the tub that he hadn't noticed some of the bubbles were actually globules of the Queen's Own Bath Oil... which was never meant to be added _to_ bath water but rubbed into the skin by a masseuse, post-bath. Jess Harper was as slippery as a greased piglet.

Though Jess didn't personally know Lucky all that well, he knew a lot _about_ him—that he was Young Doc's and Sally's cousin, that Lychee was his closest friend, that he was generally well thought of in town and considered to be a genial-natured cuss who didn't wear a gun even though he worked as a bouncer at the Prairie Rose Gentlemen's Club. It was what Jess _didn't_ know about the gentle giant that was going to cause all the trouble.

As soon as Lucky ducked through the canvas flaps, Jess flashed him one of his famous ear-to-ear 'aw shucks' smiles. Lucky responded in kind.

"I'm sure glad to see you, pard... I'm turning into a stewed prune here."

"Momma said to come help you, but she didn't say help you do what..."

"Oh... get me outta here and into the chair there..."

"Okay." Lucky started walking around to the back of the tub, sliding a little here and there.

"Where you goin'?"

"Pick you up..."

"No... no... see this handle thing over my head, how it's attached to a rope goin' through a pulley wheel and over to the wall where it ties off at that cleat?"

"Yeah."

"You go over there and untie it. Lower that triangle thing so's I can grab aholt of it, then start pullin' it up easy-like 'til I'm standin' straight..."

"Oh yeah... I see."

Lucky obediently trudged over to the cleat and followed directions, pulling the rope hand over hand in tiny increments, savoring the view... who had absolutely no idea how gorgeous he was with oiled water streaming down the muscles of his arms and chest...

Just about the time Jess' navel cleared the waterline, he got the first inkling something was amiss. The rest of him slowly ascended... and kept going...

"Uh... Lucky... you can stop now..."

The trapeze cranked up a few more inches...

"Lucky... stop... my foot's off the bottom of the tub..."

Two more inches and Jess couldn't even touch the bottom with his toes. He swung his good leg over the rim of the tub, where it dangled above the floor.

"LUCKY! PAY ATTENTION... I'M TOO HIGH NOW!"

 **The spell broken,** Lucky let go of the rope entirely. It whipped away, up and over the pulley as the trapeze followed the law of gravity and took Jess down with it. He plunged backwards with both legs pointing ceilingward. Great gouts of water sloshed over the rim of the tub as the canvas straps gave way and Jess sank to the bottom, sudsy water closing over his head. He pushed his way to the surface with both hands and gasped for breath through soap-clogged airways. Submerged once more, Jess panicked!

Lucky panicked! The object of his momentary affection was drowning! He lurched toward the tub, slipping to his knees several times before crawling around to the back and struggling to his feet. Leaning over, he thrust both brawny arms downward with the intent of hooking Jess by the armpits and pulling him up. Jess was thrashing away, cussing and howling for dear life. Twice Lucky was able to get his hands under Jess' arms only to have him slip right through.

 **Earlier, as Slim's cough had abated** in the thick scented steam of the sauna, he'd pulled off his towel and laid it on the floor before lying on top of it and falling asleep. Feets hadn't seen a need to wake him up just because he was leaving.

Rudely awakened when the commotion started, Slim jumped up and charged through the canvas partition. All he could see from that vantage was a pair of legs and a stocky rear end belonging to whoever was trying to drown Jess. With a roar, he made a flying tackle toward the unidentified hind portion, headbutting it straight on.

Lucky was trying to maintain his balance on the slippery floor with his knees against the tub for leverage. When the weight hit him from behind his feet went out from under him and he did a complete flip over the tub, landing flat on his back on the other side with his feet pointing toward the door. The several inches of standing water on the floor competing for one drain hole, coupled with two bars' worth of by now oleaginous soap and his own substantial weight, hydroplaned him right out the door flaps onto the inclined ramp up which Sally was running. Swept off her feet, Sally landed right on top of him, her skirt flying up as belly-to-belly the two of them luged down the ramp and shot into the muddy yard, scattering the chickens.

 **Just as Lucky cleared the door** and was picking up velocity on the ramp with his passenger, a surge of adrenalin possessed Jess. He managed to get the good leg underneath him and propelled himself upwards. With just the strength of his arms he was able to hitch the leg over the rim so that both feet were now on the floor with his buttocks propped against the edge of the tub. Reaching for the folded towel on top of the toga on the chair seat, his hand encountered the pistol he'd smuggled out of the house.

Jess was trembling with residual panic and fright at the near-drowning. And he was furious. Totally humiliated that some _man_ had tried to lay hands on territory where no _man_ had gone before! (Or so he was thinking.) Anger outweighed logic by a considerable degree. His first few tries at grabbing the gun failed as it tried to skitter away from his oily grasp, but with _both_ hands he was able to bring it into position... more or less.

 **In the meantime Slim had been** momentarily disoriented by the force of the impact. His only thought was to stop Jess from firing that gun. His knees and hands scrabbled uselessly on the slick floor as he tried to right himself to no avail. He crawled over to Jess and reached up to bump his partner's right elbow... but not before Jess fired three times in rapid succession.

Both were deafened by the concussion. Distracted by someone shouting something unintelligible from somewhere around knee level, Jess lost his grip on the gun. It leaped right out of his hands and into the tub. He looked down and saw Slim.

" _WHAT'RE YOU DOIN' DOWN THERE?"_

" _STOP!"_

" _WHAT?"_

" _STOP... STOP SHOOTING!"_

" _WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU..."_

" _GIMME THE DAMN GUN!"_

" _WHAT?"_

Using the tub for leverage, Slim got to his feet, at this point more worried about where the shots might have gone. He slipped and slid over to the canvas panels and yanked them aside... forgetting about the towel that wasn't there.

 **Pursuant to Emmaline's** spectacular pratfall into the rosebushes along the front of the porch, Lychee redirected his followers away from the house and toward the corral, which is when they all heard the first shouts and the very audible kerploosh of water being disturbed by something being hurled into it. Then came cussing... and more shouts and more cussing. A lot more splashing... all coming from that pseudo-tent thing behind the house.

The nuns and the two Bobs were fascinated, craning their heads around as their animals lined up, noses to corral poles. It so happened that the recently removed laundry opened up a clear line of sight from their position to the bath house and they had an unimpeded view of Lucky's plunge down the ramp with the passenger he'd collected on the way.

The first shot rang out. As if choreographed, Lychee, Roop, the two Bobs and all six women slithered, leaped, rolled and otherwise descended in one smooth move to safer ground where they hid behind the nearest handy objects... no fools, they. The second shot dispatched a pigeon minding its own business atop the barn's weather vane, which was now spinning squeakily around and around. The third shot pinged against the tin roof over the forge and ricocheted, clipping an ear on one of the spotted mules which promptly bolted. In a trice, neighing horses and braying mules were scattering every which way, mostly through the remaining laundry lines. The ones that had run up under bedsheets and couldn't see where they were going simply bucked in place.

Lucky, flat on his back with mud oozing around his ears, thought he was already dead. There was a terrible weight on his chest. His world was black. He couldn't breathe. He realized cloth was over his face.

Catching her own breath and temporarily addled, it took Sally a few seconds to understand where she'd fetched up—ignominiously astride her cousin with her black skirt covering his head. Just exactly what _had_ happened wasn't immediately clear. Looking around she observed a couple of animated bedsheets hopping up and down, a bedlam of demented chickens, some strange faces popping up from behind the water trough... nothing made any sense. She looked down to where Lucky was clawing his face free of her skirt.

" _GET OFF ME YOU COW!"_

Sally blinked and looked up just in time to witness the dramatic unveiling at the bathhouse door.

And then she began to laugh.


	26. Chapter 26

_CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—PART ONE_

 **MUSICAL BEDS**

" _ **There were ten in the bed and the little one said 'Roll over, roll over'.**_

 _ **So they all rolled over and one fell out..."**_ _(Popular kindergarten teaching song)_

 **Many hours later...** The sorting-out process had begun with the introduction of Sisters of the Divine Illumination to those members of the Sherman ranch contingent currently in presentable condition. Basins of water, soap and towels were made available in the front bedroom so that, before dinner, the women could wash up in some privacy.

Lychee, Lucky, Roop and the two Bobs went to collect the errant horses and mules. Luckily, none of them had strayed too far—they'd been tired and hungry to begin with and in their little equine minds the proximity of a barn and other horses meant FOOD.

Oxtoe and Feets were putting the finishing touches on Hotel d'Barn... three nicely heaped sleeping pallets per stall with blankets strung across the stall entrances for privacy and extra lanterns for adequate lighting. Planks on sawhorses served as a table on which rested basins and pitchers. Several buckets of water for drinking and for washing, plus a few empty ones for other more personal needs had thoughtfully been provided. (It wouldn't do to have females stumbling around outside in the dark hunting for the facility.) The floor had been carpeted with a thick layer of fresh hay, the scent more or less canceling out the lingering aroma of _l'eau de barnyard_.

Assisted by Jonesy's recitation of a recipe from _The Virginia Housewife_ (Mary Randolph, 1824), Peach turned out a fabulous macaroni and cheese and ham casserole. In the Dutch oven simmered venison stew with potatoes, onions and carrots in a savory sauce. Pans of buttermilk biscuits stood at the ready on the counter. Bubbling on a back eye was a huge pot of green beans seasoned with fatback and onions. Apple and peach cobblers cooled on the sideboard. The 'visitor' coffeepot—the one used to serve stage passengers—was steaming hot, as was the ever-present tea pot.

The kitchen and dining tables had been pushed together with the seven remaining chairs distributed along their lengths and space left open at the end for Jess' wheelchair. A headcount revealed dinner would have to be served in three shifts, so they needed to get started early, Emmaline announced.

 **After hastily retreating** behind the canvas flaps, Slim'd rejected Sally's offer of assistance but asked that she bring up a few buckets of fresh hot water and leave them outside the door—also that she retrieve shaving gear, more towels and clothing for himself and Jess from the house. He then applied himself to calming Jess down and getting both of them cleaned up, shaved and dressed.

Slim asked Jess to explain what had happened. Jess was at first reluctant to share the novel and—as he'd interpreted it—unwelcome experience but Slim succeeded in wheedling it out of him. Shaking his head thoughtfully, Slim opined that he was sure it was all a big misunderstanding... that Lucky had no prurient thoughts in mind... that he was frightened that Jess might drown... that his immediate reaction was to run over and try to lift a drowning man out of the water... exactly what Slim himself would have done. _Yadda yadda yadda._

"You really think that's all it was?" Jess asked doubtfully.

"Positive!" Slim lied positively... for Jess' peace of mind, naturally. He'd have to have a word with Lychee later on... stress the importance of keeping his boyfriend under control, especially here at the ranch. Such antics might go unnoticed or overlooked in a larger urban concentration but that dog sure wouldn't hunt in little ole Laramie. Slim knew what was what—not that he'd ever had any personal experience, mind you—but he'd been to San Francisco. To his knowledge, Jess never had.

 **By the time** Slim wheeled Jess down the ramp, the latter had regained his composure and was almost back to normal—on-his-about-to-meet-some-ladies-best-behavior normal, that is. If Slim'd mentioned they were nuns, he might not've been so cheerful. But Slim didn't know about the women yet. Jess didn't mention them because he assumed Slim already knew. Slim didn't know about the rockslide or the rescue mission, either, because Young Doc had clean forgot to tell him about it earlier before he'd gone to the bath house.

Lychee, Roop and two unidentified men were clustered at the side of the house where more basins, soap and towels were positioned on the workbench. Slim, Jess, Jonesy and Andy often performed their ablutions out here in warm weather. Lucky was nowhere to be seen.

Slim slowed down as they approached the congested area of the duckwalk... what were all these people doing here? He then screeched to a halt. There, standing right in front of him, was... Jess Harper... or as near as dammit. He had to look down quickly to reassure himself Jess was actually in the seat.

The other 'Jess' stared right back, then leaned toward Lychee, saying _sotto voce_ , "I know you said so but I wouldn't have believed it until I saw for myself..."

Lychee tried to tamp back a smirk but Slim caught it. The Eurasian was famed for his elaborate practical jokes but blame if Slim could figure out how he'd managed this one. The man standing next to him could have been... _should have been_... Jesse's identical twin, right down to the piercing blue eyes, wavy sable hair and easy grin.

Lychee put on his urbane face and took a step forward. "Slim, Jess... I'd like you meet Robert Kelly of Los Angeles, California. Bob was substituting for Mose today when they encountered the rock slide. Bob... this is Slim Sherman and Jess Harper."

"Huh?" Slim gulped.

Jess didn't say anything. He was speechless.

Bob Kelly stepped forward and held out a paw. "Pleased to meetcha, Cousin Jess. Might as well call me 'Cousin Bob' 'cause it's pretty obvious we gotta be related somewhere. I answer to 'BobCat', too."

Jess shook his hand. "Likewise... I don't know of any relatives... but like you said..."

As 'Cousin Bob' and Slim shook hands, another voice spoke up.

"Hey... what about me?" The other man stepped forward and offered to shake. The family resemblance was undeniable here as well, although this one was younger, shorter and more compactly-built. His hair was much lighter and his eyes more of a turquoise blue-green.

"Howdy. I'm Robert Cooper—'PlumbBob'. BobCat and me are cousins so I reckon you and me are, too..."

Jess was rattled to the core. As far as he knew he was the only survivor of his immediate family. His pa had been ostracized by the Harper clan at an early age and his ma had never talked much about her people. He couldn't recall any surnames from her side…

 **At that moment,** Sally stepped around the side of the house. This was a Sally unrecognizable to all but Slim, wearing one of Emmaline's day dresses... one loose enough that no corset was required but tight enough to amplify all her womanly curves. She looked impossibly regal in the simple dove-grey gown with her hair done up in loose curls. "Gentlemen... you might want to get started. The Sisters are just about done with the first seating and y'all are up next."

Slim snapped to attention... Sisters? Whose sisters? Were the Harpers holding a family reunion and no one bothered to inform him? The answer, apparently, was inside the house. He pushed the chair forward.

"If you'll excuse us... we're already washed up so we'll go on ahead."

The knot parted as the waters before Moses. Slim trundled his charge up the duckwalk and around the corner where he immediately encountered a problem...

Getting down the porch stairs had been difficult enough with Lucky carefully lowering the wheelchair down riser by riser. Going back up would require two strong individuals to lift it up to porch level. The two Bobs were happy to oblige. This won't do at all, Slim thought, making a mental note to have the Koskis build a temporary ramp over the steps.

Jonesy in his rocker and Andy on the bench were biding their time until their turns at the next seating, both of them looking like the cat that ate the canary. Sally held the door open as Slim maneuvered the wheelchair inside where the next shock awaited.

 **At the long banquet table** stretching from the parlor toward the kitchen sat Young Doc and six uniformed nuns, three of whom had to turn their heads to view the incoming personnel. As Sally beckoned to Slim to ease the wheelchair into place at the foot, Young Doc stood up.

"Ladies... these two gentlemen are Matthew Sherman, proprietor of this establishment and wheelchair driver extraordinaire, and his _aide-de-camp_ Jess Harper, late of the Big Open and current wheelchair jockey." Gesturing first to the Reverend Mother, he continued. "These ladies..."

The Reverend Mother interrupted with a mischievous look. "We're not ladies... we're nuns."

Young Doc blinked and carried on. "Yes... of course. Pardon me. May I present the Sisters of the Divine Inspiration..."

"Illumination," the Reverend Mother corrected.

"Illumination... yes, right... er... this is Sister Moira..."

"Reverend Mother, if you please..."

"Of course, my mistake... Reverend Mother Moira... Mother Bertha..."

"Sister Bertha," said the Reverend Mother. "And I'm just Reverend Mother, not Reverend Mother Moira."

Young Doc was getting flustered. "My mistake... Sister Bertha, Sister Lucy..."

"Excuse me," the Reverend Mother interrupted again, "Lucy is just Lucy. She's a postulant. She doesn't receive the title 'Sister' until she becomes a novitiate."

"I see... well... what about...?"

"Bertha, Harriet, Phoebe and Florence are all Sisters..."

"Maybe it would be easier if we just went around the table and you all just raised your hands and introduced yourselves..." Young Doc said faintly, starting to perspire.

So they did. Meanwhile, Slim blushed and looked to Sally in appeal for some kind of explanation. Sally got the message.

"Fred... didn't you _tell_ Slim... earlier?"

"Tell him what?"

"About the rockslide... you know... the stage being stuck in the canyon and all...?"

"Oh... no... I reckon I didn't... slipped my mind, as a matter of fact, what with the flood and all..." Young Doc apologized.

"Flood? What flood?"

"Now would be a good time, Fred," his sister pointed out.

Young Doc agreed and launched into a quick rundown.

 **Jess kept quiet, simply bewildered.** He wasn't sure what he'd expected but this wasn't it. He'd not been this close to this many nuns since Mexico and _those_ ones sure hadn't looked like _these_ ones, who were all young and pretty... except for the old one, of course, although she was rather nice-looking for an older lady... an older nun, that is. Mexican nuns were short, dumpy and cranky and completely enveloped in black except for that white bandanna thing around their necks and almost enclosing their faces. In fact, all you could ever see of 'em were veiny hands, beetling eyebrows, beady eyes, warty noses and pruney mouths. These ladies had little bitty white bands holding back their veils that showed an awful lot of slender neck and peachy cheeks and even little wisps of hair poking out here and there so's a man could tell if they was brunettes, blondes or redheads.

Between the bathhouse incident, this anomalous flock of females invading his home and those two jokers outside claiming to be relatives, Jess Harper was developing a whopper of a headache without even having enjoyed the three-day toot that usually preceded one.

 **Having finished their meal,** the six Sisters were escorted by Young Doc and Sally out to the barn to inspect their makeshift bedchambers.

"I'm sorry about this, Reverend Mother... the house is filled up with patients..."

"Nonsense!" she exclaimed. "A stable was good enough for Baby Jesus, it's certainly good enough for us! We've slept in much worse, believe me. Perhaps you aren't aware, Doctor," she continued, "that a substantial portion of our ministry involves traveling to mining camps and other unsavory locations—wherever people with money congregate—to solicit contributions for our order."

"I thought your mission was to minister to lost and fallen lambs?"

"No... the priests attend to that, unless the lambs are soiled doves... we get those. No... we're here mainly to tend to physical needs. The priests go for the glory... the spiritual needs of men and the saving of souls. In other words, good sir, we are the below-stairs maidservants of Mother Church."

"That's a harsh attitude coming from one who professes devotion to her calling."

"A realistic one, I'm afraid," the Reverend Mother sighed. "Now then, about our luggage... is there any chance...?"

"I'll see what I can do... but it's getting dark and..."

"Already done, brother..." Sally interjected. "Feets, Oxtoe and Roop went back to the canyon right after they caught up the mules."

"I wouldn't have asked them to go in the dark..."

"They've got lanterns. They volunteered. I think they were more worried about the three stage horses being left there overnight."

 **The Reverend Mother looked around,** noting the pillows atop neatly folded blankets and quilts. "This will do very nicely, I think... but speaking of sleeping arrangements, where are all the men going to sleep tonight? And which ones are the patients... well, aside from the one in the cast."

Sally's and Young Doc's eyes met briefly, the latter stifling a snicker.

"Emmaline—Aunt Em—was so busy with everything else she left it to me to sort it out," Sally said. "I'm thinking Jess, the one with the broken leg, can return to his hospital bed in the parlor..."

"Yes... I noticed that... quite innovative!"

"And the two Bobs can have the other two... that way the three of them can talk and hopefully figure out how they're related."

"Good idea!"

"And Slim—that's Matthew... he's got bronchitis—he can go back to _his_ own bed in the back bedroom."

"I must say he looks quite well for one with so serious an ailment..."

"That's because he just spent two hours in the sauna..."

"You have a sauna? My goodness! There's just no end to the surprises around here!"

"Yes... well. My brother Fred here—Young Doc—he can take the bed next to Slim. Andy, the boy, can take the upper bunk in the same room—he's got the measles but my brother believes he's probably past the contagion stage."

"Not a problem... all my girls have had measles or cowpox."

"Jonesy can have the cot and we'll leave Kim where he is on the lower bunk."

"Jonesy is the older man with the bad back?"

"Yes... but he won't mind the cot. He used to sleep there before they added the front bedroom addition."

"And who is Kim? Have we met him?"

"Not yet... I put him back to bed just before you got here."

"Oh... another child?"

"Um... no... he's grown but he's got broken ribs. Fred just finished sewing him up and giving him a shot of morphine so..."

"Sewing him up? Ah... that must be the gunshot wound Lychee mentioned. Who shot him, if one may inquire?"

"I'm afraid Jess did."

"The one with the broken leg..."

"Yes m'am."

"I see. And he was one of the ones fighting in the tent when we arrived and... er... shooting?"

"That was him—him and Lucky. Jess threw him out the door."

"And Lucky is the one you were... um... sitting on?"

"Yes m'am... that was our Cousin Luca... or Lucky."

"Not too lucky if a man half his size with a cast on his leg can throw him that far."

"Jess is stronger than he looks."

"Wasn't Slim in the tent also?"

"Yeah... but he was asleep, and once he nods off, you can't wake him up for love or..." _Oops._ Sally could feel her face turning red. The Reverend Mother politely pretended not to notice.

"So Jess did the shooting?"

"I didn't see but almost certainly it was him... after Aunt Em sent Lucky in there to help him out of the bathtub... Jess used to be a gunfighter and Lucky..."

"Yes... I can kind of see where this is going..."

" **Oh... you twigged to** _ **that**_ **, did you?"**

"My dear... no offense, but it simply wafts off your darling cousin. This ain't my first rodeo... I wasn't always a nun, you know. Before that I was a spoiled, rich socialite heiress... and there does seem to be an awful lot of _that_ going around in those circles..."

Sally couldn't think of a single riposte to that. Young Doc had stealthily retreated to a dark corner of the barn where he was doubled up with a fist stuffed in his mouth... valiantly trying to choke back laughter. The Reverend Mother glanced toward the corner where the muffled croaks were coming from. "You all right over there, Doctor?"

"Fine! Fine!" The answer came back as a high-pitched squeak.

The six Sisters (or five Sisters and one almost) had been standing back listening to all this with eyes like saucers and ears perked forward. If Laramie was anything like this place, they were _really_ going to like their new posting! Plus, they'd just learned an interesting fact about their prioress.

The Reverend Mother returned to the bed assignment topic, worrying it like a dog with a bone.

"I take it you and your aunt share the front bedroom?"

"Actually, no... Peach does."

"But where do you sleep?"

"When I'm here... on the... uh... the fainting couch by the window."

"What about those three old men?"

"They sleep in their _vardo_... that gypsy wagon out by the corral."

"That still leaves two unaccounted for..."

"I suppose Lychee and Lucky can put down a bedroll on the parlor floor…"

"Sounds like you have it all worked out." The Reverend Mother was thinking, but didn't say so, that this Sally had an extraordinary outlook on the proprieties… not a whit perturbed about sharing sleeping quarters with five grown men.

Young Doc was making unintelligible snorting noises in his corner.

The Reverend Mother called out to him. "Doctor, would you mind asking your aunt to come out here for a few moments... I have a proposition I'd like to make to her..."

"Of course..." Young Doc high-stepped out of there as fast as he could, holding in the guffaws until he reached the safety of the porch. That old biddy didn't miss a thing!

A few minutes later, Emmaline huffed and puffed into the barn sans nephew. "Is there a problem?"

"No problem whatsoever. However, I have an idea..."

"So do I!" Sally jumped in suddenly. "Why don't I sleep out here with the girls tonight, let Peach have the fainting couch and the Reverend Mother can bunk in with you, Auntie Em? Then the two of you can catch up on old times?" (Shortly after being introduced Emmaline Whatleigh and Moira Hanrahan had established that they'd attended the same college during the same four-year period although they hadn't known each other back then.)

"How about if we all join you out here?" Emmaline mused. "We'll have a hen party... it'll be fun! That way Luca and Lindsay can have the front bedroom. I was a little worried about Luca... he has such allergies... horse dander and hay dust and what not. He has a delicate constitution, you know. And anyway, they're very close and used to sharing a room."

 _No kidding!_ thought the Reverend Mother.

 _You ain't just whistlin' Dixie!_ thought Sally.

They shared eye rolls.

The other five were thinking what a fine figure of a man that tall naked blonde man cut even though they'd caught only a glimpse for a fraction of a second, framed in the bathhouse doorway. They weren't supposed to be thinking about those things and would probably be given a thousand Hail Marys apiece as penance at their next confessions... but it would have been worth it.

"What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Moira?" Emmaline asked.

"As it appears we may be stranded here for a few days..."

Sally and Emmaline nodded thoughtfully as the Reverend Mother unfolded her idea.

" **Slim won't like this.** He'll probably forbid it," Emmaline said.

The Reverend Mother smiled sweetly. "Then why tell him? After all, it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. What he doesn't know won't upset him."

"I don't know... it just seems so... unseemly..."

"More unseemly than a nun collaborating with a procuress?"

"I see your point..."

Sally cut in. "I'm going back to the house for more blankets and pillows... any requests?"

"Ask Peach to make us some tea. Oh... and find out where Jonesy hides his 'medicinal alcohol' out here—I know she knows because she's been getting into it."

"Also," the Reverend Mother added, "tell PlumbBob and BobCat I'd like a word before they turn in, if you don't mind..."

"Will do," Sally tossed over her shoulder as she left the barn.

While waiting for their luggage to be delivered, the six women removed their outerwear and, with Emmaline's assistance, sponged off the worst of the mud. Tunics, scapulars, underskirts and veils were hung up to dry wherever a convenient hook could be found, or flung over stall partitions. Fortunately it wasn't yet too chilly in the barn for women clad in only longjohns bottoms and chemises.

Bertha, Harriet, Phoebe, Florence and Lucy retired to one of the stalls to catch up on their daily devotions from the Book of Hours. As they'd been bouncing along in the coach, lauds, primes, terces and sexts had been observed at the proper times according to the Reverend Mother's railroad watch, but in the excitement of getting stuck in the canyon and the subsequent rescue they'd missed nones, vespers and complines. The Reverend Mother excused herself from devotions on the grounds she had more important fish to fry at the moment (she was sure the Lord understood priorities). She and Em were finalizing details of tomorrow's game plan.

As it happened, the Reverend Mother didn't need directions from Peach to ferret out Jonesy's clandestine repository. Perusing the shelves containing corked bottles of all shapes, sizes and colors with homemade labels, she had an 'aha!' moment. Rummaging around, she came up with several bottles _not_ marked 'liniment', holding them triumphantly.

"Your Jonesy's smarter than most," she observed. "Men aren't all that ingenious when it comes to hiding things... that's why they're always caught and we seldom are! He's employed the principle of 'hiding in plain sight'." Handing two of the bottles to her newfound associate, the Reverend Mother extracted a multipurpose tool from a pocket of her habit hanging nearby.

Returning to Slim's old army footlocker where she and Emmaline had ensconced themselves, she deftly uncorked the first bottle and read the label. "Blackberry, September 1870." She took an appreciative sniff of the cork and pronounced it 'a very good month.' They passed the bottle back and forth while refining The Plan and listening to the subdued chanting coming from behind the blanket curtain.

 **They were on the third bottle** when a knock on the barn door heralded the arrival of the luggage. The Reverend Mother hastily wrapped herself in a colorful woven Indian blanket while advising her flock to remain decorously out of sight. Emmaline, still fully dressed, manned the doorway as Feets, Oxtoe and Roop brought in boxes and bags and set them down in a pile. Just as they were done Sally came in, laden with changes of clothing for herself and her aunt, followed by an ambulating heap of more bedclothes and pillows with a pair of gumboots underneath. Bringing up the rear were the two Bobs.

"Peach says she's not staying alone in the house with all those men," Sally said by way of explanation.

"Peach is welcome to join us, of course," said the Reverend Mother as she moved to deflect the Finns from exiting.

"Gentlemen... your services will be required _very_ early in the morning..." She outlined the mission and five pairs of eyebrows shot up.

"Meester Slim, he vill not like dis..." Feets ventured hesitantly.

"Which is why we aren't telling him," Reverend Mother said firmly. "Now... are you with us? We need you to show us where to look..."

"Yah miss... vee doo dis..."

"And how about you boys?" she swiveled her eyes to the two grinning Bobs. "You in?"

PlumbBob grinned even wider, if that were possible. "Hell yeah... wouldn't miss this rumpus for all the tea in..."

"Mind your manners, cousin!" Bobcat interrupted. "What he meant to say, m'am, was that we'd be pleased to help out..."

"Splendid! And remember... not a word to the others! We need to ride out at dawn, which means we need twelve good horses saddled up and ready to go. Can you boys take care of that?"

Feets affirmed that they could.

"Wait a minute!" Emmaline squawked, counting heads. "Surely you're not planning on going, too, Moira?"

"Damn straight I am!" Reverend Mother lifted her eyes heavenward. "Dear Lord, I apologize for that..."

The men struggled to keep straight faces.

"All righty then. You boys go get your beauty sleep and we'll reassemble at five."

"Yah miss... we bees reddy!" The three Koskis pirouetted in unison and marched out of the barn... but not before Feets made note of the empties on the floor by the footlocker.

Remarking that she and Peach had to make a final trip to the house and would be right back, the two women exited followed by the two Bobs.

 **The Reverend Mother and her flock** retrieved sleepwear from their bags. Soon all were encased in voluminous cotton flannel gowns and seated on Indian blankets spread in a circle on the floor. More bottles of homemade hooch were extracted from the shelves, uncorked and passed around. The Reverend Mother reassured the five doubtful faces that as this was neither _sacramental_ nor _kosher_ wine but unblessed preventative medicinal alcohol, it was perfectly safe to drink.

The Reverend Mother and Emmaline both looked up when Sally and Peach entered, each carrying two covered wicker baskets.

"Good grief! I hope that isn't more food... I ate so much at dinner I couldn't stuff down another morsel!" the Reverend Mother exclaimed.

Sally grinned and set one of the baskets on the floor in front of the Reverend Mother, then lifted off the towel covering it to reveal the infant underneath. "This is Tiger Lily."

The Reverend Mother oohed and aahed, reaching for the baby. "May I?"

"Certainly... help yourself. Would you like to feed her?" Sally extracted a bottle from the other basket.

"She's precious! How old?"

"We don't really know for sure... we think maybe a week or less?"

"Oh... so she's not...?"

"No... but she is now," Sally said firmly, anticipating surprise and objection on her aunt's part. However, Emmaline remained silent. "She was left on the doorstep, we think by someone from the Sioux reservation... hoping to save her life. They're having a terrible time with the measles..."

"Yes... of course..."

The other women crowded around, demanding turns holding the child... perhaps privately sorrowing for the children they would never have. In the meantime, Peach was unloading her own basket... lidded tin milk pails filled with hot sugared tea and enough tin cups to go around. In short order, Lily, replete with formula and cuddling, fell asleep and was reinstalled in her basket. No one was yet sleepy enough to turn in.

"Everything quiet in the house?" Emmaline asked.

"Yup. Fred and Jonesy're playing poker at the kitchen table with the Bobs. Lychee and Lucky are over at the Koski's _vardo_ playing skruuvi—that's a Russian card game. The other four are tucked up for the night."

"Cards!" the Reverend Mother exclaimed. "What a wonderful idea! Anyone up for a game of whist?" She produced from her bag two packs of dog-eared playing cards.

"Haven't played it in years," Emmaline said, "but as I recall it's a four-hand game and there's nine of us."

Sally grinned. "If I might make a suggestion... and one that'll come in more useful in future..."

"Oh? What's that?" the Reverend Mother asked.

"Stud poker..."

"And this would be useful how?"

Emmaline caught on right away and smirked. "You'll be needing additional start-up funds for the new convent... and the local populace can be downright stingy—especially the women, as men control all the money. The easiest and most fruitful way of separating a sucker from his gold is challenging him to a poker game. There's not a man around who doesn't believe beating a woman at cards is like taking candy from a baby."

"You're proposing we take up... _gambling?_ " The Reverend Mother was incredulous.

Emmaline shrugged. "All my girls know how to play poker and the men seem to enjoy it. The trick is not to win _too_ often or _too_ much. They consider their winnings as a little extra bonus in their work, to be spent on personal luxuries... much as a farmwife regards her butter-and-egg income."

"I'm afraid the Mother House would take a mighty dim view of that undertaking!"

"Mother House doesn't have to know... you can put it on the books as donations. And it doesn't have to be for money... you could play for goods and services, such as a cord of firewood or a brace of chickens..."

"But what if we lose? We can hardly pay up with... um... services of the sort your young ladies provide!" Shocked giggles broke out in the background.

Emmaline wasn't fazed. "No... but you could certainly ante up others of equal value to the many unattached gentlemen in these parts... a bit of mending, a load of laundry, the occasional apple pie, a home-cooked meal."

The Reverend Mother's face took on a calculating expression. "I'm beginning to see the logic here. But... who will teach us this… poker?"

"Why, my niece... naturally. Among her many other talents she's a card shark of the first order."

Sally just smiled and shuffled.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—PART TWO_

 **A COVEY OF COWGIRLS**

" _ **Don't squat with your spurs on."**_ _(Will Rogers)_

 **Thursday, October 6 (3:30am in the kitchen)...** Despite the early hour and only a few hours of sleep, Peach McNutt was in a positively cheerful frame of mind as she and her mistress stole back into a house reverberating with the buzzsaw snores of eight slumbering men. First she set the sleeping baby's basket on the kitchen table and fished her dentures from the glass of water they'd been soaking in all night. Emmaline had given her strict instructions to not breathe a word of the forthcoming expedition to any of the men in the house. With mouse-like stealth Peach set about getting the stove going and putting both coffeepots on to boil.

Emmaline thought about asking Peach to help her shove the dining table back to its normal position in the center of the parlor—its current location, still butted up to the kitchen table, impeded traffic through the portal between the two rooms. But the scraping of wooden legs over floorboards would wake up everyone else and they'd just have to push it back again for supper. The table stayed where it was.

 _(_ _ **Nonie's note concerning cast iron stoves...**_ _I recollect Meemaw fussin' and cussin' over that kitchen stove a hers every mornin'... emptyin' out the ash box, layin' in the kindlin' an' twists of paper if there was any, strikin' a big sulphur-smellin' match an' squattin' to blow on the fire to get 'er goin' good, addin' in wood from the apple basket by the back door, all the while dancin' around gettin' the dampers an' flues adjusted. It was a pure 'n tee marvel to me how she always knew, without a thermometer, when the oven was just right to shove in a pie or a pan of biscuits!)_

 **From the root cellar** where perishables were stored Emmaline brought up sugar-cured ham, wheel cheese, butter and yesterday's milk, eggs and biscuits. Silently the two of them began assembling ham and cheese biscuits, wrapping them in wax paper and stacking them in baskets to carry out to the roundup crew. It had been Reverend Mother's thinking that breakfast should be delayed until the troupe was well out of sight and out of reach. Emmaline agreed.

Emmaline scoured the root cellar for whatever transportable food items could be packed along with sandwiches—jars of cucumber and fruit pickles, pickled eggs, dried fruits, last season's apples that weren't too spotty... anything not requiring cooking that could sustain twelve people throughout the day to whatever time they turned up for supper.

Next Emmaline woke up the two Bobs by tweaking their toes. PlumbBob and BobCat weren't used to dressing in the dark. The latter grumbled that his left boot didn't seem to be fitting right. PlumbBob shushed him so he wouldn't wake up Jess, but a husky voice muttered from the corner.

"What time is it?"

"Quarter past sparrow-fart," BobCat whispered.

"Where you boys goin'?"

PlumbBob thought quickly and spoke first... they hadn't been provided with a script for this contingency. "Miss Emma says long as we's stuck here we might as well be useful and earn our keep. Bobcat and me and them three ole furrin cowpokes gonna round us up some cattle today."

"Sounds like Miss Emma, all right."

"You kin go on back to sleep. Sorry we woke ya..."

"Okay. Good luck." Jess drifted back into la-la land.

Peach had an oil lamp lit and coffee ready for them. BobCat pulled the sheet-curtain closed so the light wouldn't bother Jess. In the lamplight he and PlumbBob discovered they were each wearing one of the other's boots. While they exchanged footwear, Peach poured coffee into lidded tin pails for them to carry out to the barn along with the baskets of food. They grabbed their hats, gunbelts and jackets and headed out the door. Emmaline followed close behind with a third basket.

 **3:45am in the pasture...** Feets was considering he might've been a tad overly optimistic about producing twelve 'good horses ready to ride' by five in the morning. By his head count the approximately ten acres of pasture currently contained twenty-three horses, five mules and a donkey... none of which were the least bit interested in being caught up and saddled in (by their estimation) the middle of the night. The pasture itself was roughly oval in shape with no convenient corners in which to chase and trap them. The Koskis and the Bobs were on foot... and the footing was fraught with obstacles... big fresh steaming heaps of them. It took them nearly forty-five minutes—offering enticements in the form of chopped apples and carrots—to round up twelve animals and lead them one by one to the corral where Sally was methodically slapping on saddles.

Right off they'd run into a few glitches... saddles, for instance. There were only ten of them plus Slim's old dried-out McClellan that hadn't seen soap or oil in five years. Oxtoe reckoned he could rig up something with a packsaddle and blankets for padding but the rider'd have to be narrow in the hindquarters! There weren't enough canteens to go around. Sally recalled having been shown some native waterskins and Mexican wine bladders in Jonesy's junk collection in an antique travel trunk. These were found, rinsed out and filled at the pump.

 **4:15am in the barn...** The Sisters of the Divine Illumination were climbing back into their habits. Trousers would have been more appropriate for what they were about to undertake—however, none of them owned any. All were openly envious of Sally's eminently more practical garb. Reverend Mother promised that after they got settled in their new mission she would see about obtaining these wonderfully functional overalls—brown ones, of course, with matching chambray work shirts. If women were obliged to do men's work, then they ought to be able to enjoy the comforts of men's clothing, right? Their existing headdresses would continue to identify them as Brides of Christ.

They might even consider changing the name of their order to _Reform_ Sisters... and what did Emmaline think about that? Not much, she opined... any time you put the word _'reform'_ out there, people automatically assume you _used_ to be something far less savory. Reverend Mother granted she had a point. How about _Progressive_ Sisters?

 **4:30am in the corral...** __Ten horses were saddled and hitched to a top rail including six known working cowponies—Slim's Alamo and his remount Ranger, Jess' Traveler and his remount Scout, Andy's PeeWee and Jonesy's Chief. Four soot-black saddle horses that had _never_ worked cattle—Sally's Tar Baby, Young Doc's Vulcan, Lychee's Duke and Lucky's Prince. Sally was in the process of saddling Blaze, her own livery horse that BobCat had ridden in from town—an unknown quantity in the field but gentle and patient, a favorite rental with women and children. The five mules and two vanners were out of the question. Also rejected were the nine stage horses which as far as Roop could determine had never been under saddle and in any case were used to level, mostly graded roadways, not the uneven terrain they would be traversing.

That left Kim's diminutive Scooter, whose knees were scabby but sound enough. Five days of bone idleness and unlimited access to good grazing had wrought an astonishing change in the dun pony. His mealy muzzle, primitive markings including dorsal and leg stripes, and pangaré countershading with seal points were more pronounced now that his winter coat was coming in. The Finnish brothers—scions of the reindeer-herding semi-nomadic Sámi tribe—were familiar with the fjord horses of their sedentary-farming Norwegian neighbors, and at first—noting the wide deep chest, thick arched crest and heavily muscled shoulders and haunches—thought they were encountering one of these. However, a closer inspection revealed differences: a solid color mane and tail rather than bi-color; a naturally erect brushy mane instead of one that'd been roached; lack of forelock or feathering; an overall body structure substantially lighter than a fjord horse.

At fourteen hands, Scooter was a smidgen under the average mustang's height of fourteen point three—a little on the smallish side for a grown man's mount... but then Kim was on the short side himself. Too, it was odd for a white man (or whatever Kim was) to be riding a barefoot horse. Scooter's small flinty hooves showed no nail holes or rasp marks to indicate he'd ever been shod... or at least not recently. After noting Kim's gear included only a bosal bridle, Roop had checked the animal's mouth... sure enough, no sign it had ever encountered a bit.

Judging the horse's age to be somewhere between fifteen and twenty, Roop had observed the animal's movements in the pasture. He was fast, very fast, and could spin on a dime. Roop suspected he could easily clear the fence if he took a notion. Initially thinking to put the smallest of the women on this one, the old man decided to take him for himself.

 **4:45am in the barn and corral...** Emmaline was apportioning foodstuffs into saddlebags and carrysacks for each rider. In the predawn grayness the men were busy attaching these to the saddled horses. Reverend Mother was sending the women out one at a time to be directed to whichever mount had been designated for her. Both were a touch on the grouchy side as the production line wasn't moving as quickly as they'd like. Still, Emmaline admitted with a wry grin, they weren't doing too badly for a couple of old broads with stupendous hangovers.

 **5:00am in the kitchen...** Peach had another round of coffee cooking and was whipping up a batch of biscuit dough when Kim suddenly appeared around the corner, looking rough as a cob. Making a somewhat stiff _hezhang_ and offering a polite morning greeting in Cantonese to 'Little Auntie', he inquired if she was well and if the coffee was done. She bowed back and informed him that she was and it wasn't but there was tea in the pot.

" _If Young Master Dragon would care to seat himself at the table, I shall serve..."_

" _No... thank you... please do not trouble yourself. I can get my own... I need to move around a little anyway..."_

" _As you wish, Young Master Dragon..."_

They grinned at each other over the dragon business... a sly joke on her part. Kim took a blue willow cup and saucer from the sideboard and filled the cup with strong, fragrant _dian hong_ , leaving enough clearance for sugar and condensed milk from the open tin on the counter. Peach made a scurrilous remark about the filthy _gweiloh_ habit of defiling perfectly good tea while rolling out biscuit dough at one end while he leaned against the counter with his back to the window. They continued conversing pleasantly in low tones.

Young Doc was next to appear, looking like a circus bear in a rumpled union suit with morning stubble and bedhair. He lowered his bulk into a chair with a groan and a moan that could loosely be interpreted as a 'good morning'. Last night's card games had been assisted by generous rounds of brandy.

"Coffee!" he croaked, squinting a bleary eye at Kim. "What're you doing up so early?"

Kim shrugged with his good shoulder. "Slept too much, I reckon. Back hurts and all my joints are stiff. I feel like I'm a hundred years old."

Peach started wiping off her hands in order to attend to Young Doc but Kim intercepted her. "No... I'll take care of him..." Getting another cup and saucer, he turned to pick up the sugar bowl and happened to glance out the window...

 **5:14am in the barn...** "I think we're good to go, Em..." Reverend Mother was looking around in case she'd forgot something. Sister Phoebe was striding toward the door and Lucy was pawing through her bag for something or other.

"Let's get a move on, girls... time's a-wasting!"

"I'm going! I'm going!" Sister Phoebe tossed back over her shoulder as she exited the barn... just as Kim was looking out the window.

"Hang on a sec!" Lucy said, seizing the item and stuffing it in her pocket.

Reverend Mother and Emmaline shook hands.

"You just follow the Koski's lead, Moira, and you won't go wrong!"

"Just in case..." Reverend Mother crossed herself, "I've got the map and a compass..."

"Good hunting!"

"I'm feeling lucky. Our Blessed Savior will guide us straight to those damned cattle, I'm sure of it!" Reverend Mother stated confidently, hastily adding "Heavenly Father, I apologize for that!"

 **5:15am in the kitchen...** Kim's mouth fell open. He made a gargling noise and dropped the cup on the counter. Fortunately, it didn't shatter. Peach, preparing to punch out biscuits with a #1 tin can, halted in mid-punch and looked up at him, startled. At the table, Young Doc jerked his head towards both of them, frowning.

" _What is wrong, Young Master?"_ Peach inquired in Cantonese.

" _Did you see that?"_

" _Did I see what?"_

" _A nun... a holy woman... she just came out of the barn!"_

Peach was in a quandary. She'd been told in no uncertain terms to say nothing... _NOTHING!_... about the goings-on in the barn. If asked she knew NOTHING about ANYTHING. It therefore followed that she couldn't possibly have SEEN anything if there was NOTHING to be seen. She sidled over to peer out the window just as Lucy flew out the barn door.

" _Look... there goes another one!"_

" _I see nothing, Young Master."_

"What're you looking at? What's going on out there?" Young Doc asked, getting up and crowding next to them.

The west-facing window afforded a view of the showers, the poultry coops and Andy's pets' cages, the side of the barn with the lean-to sheltering the forge, and a thin slice of the front of the barn. Anything to the left of that was obscured by a small tree and overgrown rose bush at the corner of the house. The corral wasn't visible from this angle. The sky had lightened enough to make out most of the structures if not the finer details.

"I don't see anything unusual," Young Doc grumbled. "What's got you all riled up?"

Kim was breathing hard and his eyes looked like poached eggs.

"Two nuns just came out of the barn..." he wheezed.

"Yeah, so?"

Kim turned to stare at him. "Don't you understand? _Nuns..._ two of them... I saw them!"

"What of it?" It suddenly dawned on Young Doc that Kim knew nothing of yesterday's events... including the fact that there were six Catholic sisters on the premises. The mischief gremlin sitting on his shoulder couldn't let that pass...

"You're not well, son. Best come and sit down..." He gestured toward the table. Peach caught on and turned away, struggling to keep from laughing out loud.

Kim swiveled his head and saw... no mistake... yet another habit-clad form transiting the yard! "There's another one... we're being invaded! Come look if you don't believe me..."

Young Doc sighed and looked out the window just as the Reverend Mother disappeared from view and Emmaline came out of the barn carrying four tin pails.

"All I see is Emmaline... and I can guarantee _she_ ain't no nun!"

Pushing Young Doc aside, Kim hurried wild-eyed around the corner toward the front door, ripping it open and running out onto the porch. A half-second later he was back in, slamming the door shut and leaning against it, panting. _"WE'RE SURROUNDED... THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!"_ he yelled.

From the back corner of the parlor... "For Pete's sake what's all that yellin'? Is it Injuns?"

"Don't get excited, Jess..." Young Doc hollered back. "It's just Kim having hallucinations..."

"Yeah... well... he woke me up and now I hafta... I mean... I could use some help back here!"

"Just a minute... be right with you." Young Doc marched over to Kim and took his arm, dragging him back to the table and forcing him into a chair. "Sit right there... don't move. I'll be right back soon as I see to Jess." He disappeared behind the sheet-curtain.

Emmaline came in the front door and deposited the pails on the table. "Peach... rinse these out please. Good morning, Kim... how are..." Then, taking in his quivering hands, bloodless face and white-ringed eyes, "Oh my! Whatever's wrong, child?"

"Nuns," he whispered. "There's _nuns_ out there."

Emmaline narrowed her brows. "Why yes, of course, dear... six of them..."

"You mean... there really _are_ nuns... here... on this ranch?"

"Yes... they're going for an early morning constitutional. Is that a problem?"

Young Doc returned. Kim shuddered and shot him a baleful look. "Not funny, Doc!"

Young Doc chuckled. "Sorry... couldn't help myself. Shoulda seen your face! Don't tell me you're frightened of nuns?"

"Obviously _you_ didn't go to parochial school..."

"No... I didn't."

"Fred... finish your coffee and get dressed. We need milk and eggs..."

"Em... I haven't even _had_ any yet! Get one of the Koskis to do the milking."

"The Koskis are unavailable at the moment. They're out rounding up cows. Sally and the two other gentlemen went along to help. You do the cow. I'll do the chickens."

"How about I do the chickens and you do the cow?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Fred! I haven't milked a cow in twenty years."

"You may have noticed... I'm still in my longjohns. And you might want to get dressed yourself first and... uh... comb your hair before someone gets the impression you've been rolling in the hay all night."

Emmaline was still attired in her nightgown and wrapper, her loosely plaited hair festooned with wisps of straw. It occurred to her that Lychee and Lucky were occupying the room where her clothes were. "I suppose if the chickens don't mind that I'm inappropriately dressed, neither will the cow. So hop to it, nephew."

"What about the nuns?" Kim asked plaintively.

"They'll be gone in a few minutes... don't worry about them," Emmaline advised.

 **5:30am outside the corral...** Everyone was mounted up and ready to pull out. Feets held up a hand. In the other hand he held a clay jug, uncorked. "Yust vun moment, eh?"

"What's that?' Reverend Mother asked suspiciously.

"Hair uff dogh... goot vor bad head, yah? Und vor bless hoont..."

Yup, Sally thought as he handed the jug over to Reverend Mother. If ever a hunt needed the blessing of a stirrup cup, this was it.

Reverend Mother took an appreciate sniff and a swig, then passed it over to the nearest rider. Nothing like a shot of akvavit in the morning to get the blood up! When the jug had made its way around back to Feets, he ceremoniously dashed it against the nearest fence post.

"Vee go now."


	27. Chapter 27

_CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—PART ONE_

 **FAMILY MATTERS**

" _ **Family isn't always blood. It's the people in your life who want you in theirs;**_

 _ **the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything**_

 _ **to see you smile and who love you no matter what."**_ _(Author unknown)_

 **6:00am at breakfast...** Lychee and Lucky weren't normally early risers but the aromas of breakfast in the making lured them from their lair. After a hurried trip out back and a stop at the outdoor wash station they joined Young Doc, Kim and Jess at the extended table. Emmaline took advantage of the now-vacated front bedroom to change out of her nightwear. Peach indicated through grunts and gestures that breakfast wasn't quite ready yet and if they wanted coffee they'd have to serve themselves.

Appointing himself 'mother', Young Doc got up to fetch cups and saucers and take charge of pouring. Jess and Lucky studiously avoided eye contact with each other as the sugar bowl and cream pitcher were passed around. No mention was made of yesterday's imbroglio.

Slim arrived next, already dressed as if expecting to be going somewhere. Though not coughing at the moment, illness still showed in his haggard face. Close behind came Jonesy and Andy—also dressed, washed and more or less alert.

Returning from the bedroom in her day attire, Emmaline was dismayed to find all present and accounted for. Of all the days they could have chosen to wake up early _en masse!_ She'd been hoping to conceal the missing horses for as long as possible, not to mention the reason for their absence. No one but Kim and Young Doc had yet poked a nose out the door to discover the depleted pasture. Kim'd been too agitated at the sight of nuns for it to register they'd been on horseback. And Young Doc hadn't noticed either, being too intent on his milk and egg mission.

Emmaline shuttled platters of scrambled eggs, bacon, powder biscuits and flapjacks as fast as Peach could turn them out. Kim took one look at the food and turned a whiter shade of pale, saying he wasn't hungry. Gathering up the baby's basket and a bottle, he moved to a chair by the fireplace to feed her.

Jess was in a good mood. With the wheelchair positioned near his bed (in place of the despised commode chair), he'd managed to dress himself and move—not without difficulty—from the bed to the chair and even wheel himself to the table. (Young Doc and Emmaline had exchanged knowing glances of approval... willingness to adapt to an alien situation—and making an autonomous effort to do so—were indications of a successful recovery both physically and psychologically.)

They were a good fifteen minutes into the meal before Andy thought to inquire why the religious ladies weren't joining them for breakfast. And where were Sally and the Bobs?

"I believe Em said they've gone for a walk..." Young Doc said. "Sally and those other two are out on the range with the Koskis, looking for cattle... isn't that what you said, Em? Pass the biscuits, please..."

"They go for walks in the dark? Why?" As always, young Andy was never at a loss for questions. "Are there any more flapjacks?"

"Um... morning prayers... they say prayers at certain times of the day... the ones at six in the morning are called 'primes', I believe..." Emmaline evaded, hoping she'd got that right.

"Ain't they... aren't they gonna eat breakfast?"

"No... they ate much earlier. I expect they'll be gone all day. They've got a lot of praying to do." Emmaline mentally crossed her fingers. So far she hadn't lied... unless lying by omission counted. But pretty soon she'd have to come clean.

Young Doc's mind was skipping ahead. "Lychee, when we're done here I want you or Lucky to ride to town and see if the river's gone down any."

"I'll go, Fred," Lucky volunteered, still feeling disgraced even though last night he'd proferred to both Jess and Slim apologies which had been grudgingly accepted. Later, in the privacy of their bedroom Lychee had advised him that he'd best keep his distance from Jess for the duration of their stay.

"If it's passable, ride on in and let Pearl know I'm still out here. Then go to Em's house and let the head penguin know those six sisters she's expecting are here and safe. If the river's low enough to bring a buggy across, hitch up Pearl's surrey and drive it back here so we can get the ladies to town."

"What about the moratorium on travel, Fred?" Emmaline asked. "Are they aware of the situation?"

"We knew from the onset that absolute containment was impossible. Mother Mary did send her counterpart a telegram about the measles outbreak and got a message back that they were all immune, so no problem there. In any event, now that folks are past the panic stage they're more inclined to observe cautions about carrying the disease elsewhere. Although it looks like the worst is over, I'd like you and Peach and Sally to hold off returning home for a few more days."

"What about me, Fred?" Lychee asked. "Lee Wing agreed I could have some time off to help around here if you need me... not that I'm too handy with farm work..."

"I have a few things in mind for us... that damned kitchen door that's stuck, for instance. We're going to dismount it and plane it down. Slim... I'm assuming you've got a plane somewhere around here...?"

"In the toolbox in the forge," Slim said.

"Good. And there's wood needs chopping into kindling..."

"Me? Chop wood?" Lychee mouthed faintly.

"And then we're gonna rewash all that laundry that was torn off the line yesterday...?"

"Laundry?" Lychee squeaked.

"Did someone turn a parrot loose in here? Yes... laundry. How hard can that be?"

Emmaline and Jonesy rolled their eyes. Lychee turned to his partner with a look of desperation but Lucky was grinning and shaking his head negatively. "Nope. Not trading."

"Doctor Whatleigh? Can I go outside long enough to visit my pets and feed 'em?"

"No fever? Chills? Aches? Coughing?"

"No sir!"

"Okay then... fifteen minutes. And wear a jacket."

"Yes sir!" Andy scampered for the door, nearly sideswiping Lucky who was hopping on one foot trying to pull on a boot. They collided in the doorframe, wedging themselves together momentarily until popping through to the porch. Two minutes later they were back...

" **Uh... Slim... Doctor Whatleigh**... the horses are gone..." Andy said.

Heads snapped around at the table. "What do you mean... gone?" Young Doc asked slowly.

"Gone... as in stolen?" Slim barked, getting up quickly.

"Not all of 'em, Slim," Andy clarified. "All the stage horses are there... and the mules... but all the others... gone... and the gate's still closed."

Young Doc and Slim pushed past them and each other to get out the door... where they stood looking out over the railing in dumb disbelief. It was true... nine bays and chestnuts, two brownish-gray mules and three speckled ones... and one donkey... that's all there was. They turned and came back in. A grim-faced Slim hooked his gunbelt off the rack...

"Where do you think you're going?" Young Doc asked.

"I can't just _sit_ here doing nothing, Fred. Someone's gotta go after 'em!" Slim barked.

"Absolutely not. No way. Forget it! You're staying indoors if I have to hogtie you."

"But..."

"Wait!" Young Doc commanded. "Let's think this out... they didn't let themselves out and wander off... and rustlers would've taken all of them... so there has to be another explanation for why just the _riding_ horses are missing..."

"What do you want me to do, Cousin?" Lucky asked.

"A horse is a horse, Lucky. Use one of the stage nags... or a mule if you have to. Lychee... go help him catch one."

"Okay..." Lucky answered doubtfully and wandered off. Lychee shrugged and followed.

Young Doc revolved, fixing a gimlet eye on his aunt who was endeavoring to look innocent and failing miserably.

"Emmaline..." he said sternly. "I believe you've got some explaining to do... where in Hades are those horses?"

 _ **Miss**_ **Emma gracefully subsided** into a chair, hands firmly clasped on the tabletop, back erect, head held high. But it was _Nurse_ Emma who spoke and pointed The Finger.

"Do _not_ use that tone with us, young man. Sit down... both of you!"

Startled into obedience, Slim put the gunbelt back on the rack and did as told. So did Young Doc.

"First things first... Mister Jones, you and Master Andrew move down to the other end of the table and help Peach with the breakfast dishes... you can listen, wash and dry all at the same time..."

"I was just goin' out to feed my pets!" Andy objected.

"Then go do it and come right back."

The front door opened. Lucky and Lychee were back.

"Now what?" Young Doc grated irritably.

"No saddles..."

"None?"

"Not a one," Lychee said.

"What do you want me to do, Fred?" Lucky repeated.

Young Doc clasped a hand to his face. "Oh for God's sake! Can either one of you ride bareback?"

The two men looked at each other.

"Um... no..." Lychee said.

"Then hitch up a pair of mules to the buckboard. Heysoos, Maria and Guiseppe! Do I have to spell _everything_ out for you, Lucky?"

Lychee snickered. "Fred... how long have we known one another?"

"Why... all our lives... what's that got to do with it?"

"And you ask a question like that?"

"I concede your point."

"And I rest my case."

"Uh... Fred...?" Lucky queried.

"Now what?" Young Doc was grinding his molars.

"Which two mules should I take?"

Emmaline called from the table. "Luca, dear... just take the first two you and Lychee can catch."

"Uh... okay Ma." Lucky left again.

"Lychee... please do as Fred asked and then get started on that door."

"Yes, Auntie Em..." He quickly disappeared, grateful to escape whatever tirade might be about to descend.

 **Jess was quiet as a mouse,** his mind elsewhere—mulling over the previous night's conversation with the Bobs, trying not to get _too_ enthused at the possibility of contact with actual living relatives after all these years of thinking himself alone. Names of other interrelated families had been bandied back and forth—Harmans, Smiths, O'Rourkes, Stones, Martins, Tanners, Littmans, Wheelers, Darrahs, Duncans, Reeds, Rudds, Kirbys, Pokes, Wallaces—none of which had rung any bells for Jess. Neither Bob could recollect, right off, any Harper relations... but that didn't mean there weren't any. Jess had later dreamed of riding with a gang—every one of whom looked like him. At the moment he wasn't paying too much attention.

Kim, too, was silent... staring into the fireplace with the infant drowsing in his lap, to all appearances lost in a world of his own and oblivious to the drone of voices from the table behind him—which couldn't have been farther from the truth. Now that he'd got past the logy stage of waking up and the temporary panic of thinking he was going nuts, he was perfectly alert and attuned to whatever fascinating issue was about to be addressed. Obviously he'd slept through some significant events. (While it was true nuns in general set his teeth on edge, corporeal nuns were preferable to hallucinatory ones). The best way of learning things others don't necessarily want you to know about is to sit perfectly still for long periods of time until they forget your presence. They simply don't see you anymore even though you're right there in plain sight. Kim had perfected the art.

He was also thinking about Scooter's deep-seated hatred of cows, wishing the unknown rider luck and hoping not too many cows were irretrievably damaged or killed today.

 **Nurse Emma was still speaking.** "You may set your mind at ease, Mister Sherman. Your livestock are neither lost, stolen nor strayed. The fact of the matter is that all available riding animals have been requisitioned for the purpose of rounding up your cattle and that is where they presently are."

Slim's forehead crinkled in confusion. "But's that's only six people... why would they need...?"

"Twelve riders, Mr. Sherman... The Sisters of the Divine Ilumination have joined your merry band of cowpunchers. They expect to have the majority of your bovines contained today."

"You're pulling my leg!" Slim turned to Young Doc. "Tell me she's joking!"

Young Doc looked stupified himself, as if trying to decide between anger or amusement. "Oh... I doubt Nurse Emma's capable of joking! If she says there's a pack of nuns out riding the range, then that's probably the case..."

"Nooooooooooooo!" Slim moaned, burying his pink face in his hands. "This can't be happening! I'll be the laughingstock of Albany County when this gets out!"

"Mister Sherman! Which is more important to you... preserving your pride or securing your livelihood? In times of adversity a prudent and intelligent man accepts assistance when offered out of generosity of spirit, no matter how unlikely the source!"

"I understand that but..."

"But what? You've made it clear that the safety of your herd is critical... so this is one less problem on your plate. You should be grateful that the ladies just happened along in time to help resolve it."

"I am... I am... but you don't understand... it's that they _are_ women, and women shouldn't be..."

"Shouldn't be what? Doing _men's_ work? Can it possibly have escaped your attention that women have been doing _men's_ work since time immemorial... in addition to what has been historically regarded as _women's_ work?"

Slim again turned to Young Doc for support, sputtering "Can't you get her to understand? It's just not... it isn't _right!"_

"Just a minute, young man! You consider yourself a Christian, do you not?"

"Well... yes, I..."

"Then let's examine this another way..." Nurse Emma insisted. "It's the Reverend Mother's conviction that Divine Providence led her and her flock here at the exact time and place their particular skill sets were needed. Five of them are ranch-bred and born—hardy pioneer stock. They've been around cattle all their lives. They can ride and shoot as well any man. Reverend Mother herself comes from a family of Thoroughbred racehorse breeders. She claims her mother got off her horse and gave birth in the middle of a steeplechase, then got back on and finished the course."

"Still... what am I going to tell folks?"

"Why... the truth of course! You prayed for a miracle and this is what you got. It was the Lord's will. Who are you to argue with God about the form in which it arrives? They certainly won't!"

 **Young Doc jumped back in.** "Good... now that we've got _that_ settled... Slim, have you done anything about that list I asked you to make?"

"Well... no. Not yet..."

"What about you?" Young Doc cut his eyes at Jess. "No? Then I suggest the two of you put your heads together. We can't make any more arrangements if we don't know what's needed."

"I can make my own arrangements, thank you," Slim said stiffly, a twitching jaw muscle and hands clenched into fists on the tabletop betraying that fabled Sherman stubbornness.

"Of course you could... if you were well," Young Doc soothed. "But you're not."

"It _is_ my ranch and my head's working just fine!"

Andy returned with record speed and sidled into the empty chair next to Jonesy. It had been his intention to linger outside as long as he could get away with it, but his adolescent antennae had detected the strong probability of an adult conversation about to get underway and he wasn't about to miss any of _that_ if he could help it!

 _ **Nurse**_ **Emma vanished** in an imaginary puff of smoke and _Miss_ Emma reappeared. Jess would later swear he could actually _see_ her face changing from chiseled and forbidding to soft and motherly.

"Slim... do you trust us... me and Fred, that is?"

"Yeah... of course, Miss Emma... but..."

"Then will you listen to what I have to say?"

"Yes m'am..."

"I'd like to tell you a little story you've probably not heard before..."

Slim relaxed minutely, wanting to know more about these 'arrangements' but not wishing to appear rude.

"My brother Alfred... Old Doc... and I came out west in forty-three... on the same train as your folks and Jebediah's family. Alfred thought very highly of your father, and Mary Grace and I became close friends on that adventure west. We remained friends during our time in Oregon... until your parents decided to settle in Wyoming and we moved to California. You were five years old at the time. Do you remember that... or living in a tent those first few months until your father got the soddy built?"

"No... not really..."

Emmaline continued. "In fifty-five Alfred and I elected to leave San Francisco and relocate our families here... in part due to your parents' blandishments. Paradise, they said it was. I must say, I was appalled to find this so-called town to be nothing more than a trading post in the wilderness—a wide boulevard of mud bordered by tents and shanties. There were no brick-and-mortar buildings or even wooden ones."

"I had no idea you even knew my Ma," Slim admitted, wondering what this had to do with current affairs.

"For reasons which I'm sure you'll understand after you've thought about it, your mother and I decided it would be in your family's best interest to keep our association low-key..."

"Ah... yeah... I can see why... the Prairie Rose."

"Exactly. There were forty schooners in our train when we started out from St. Louis, and nearly two hundred people including children. We used oxen—four- and six-up hitches. A few families had mules. It took us four months to make the crossing and we were lucky to reach Oregon with relatively few deaths _not_ due to natural causes.

"Life on a wagon train is very different from that of an established settlement or town. They are, in effect, mobile cooperatives—or socialist societies somewhat in the Marxian vein... that is, they _become_ that way over the course of almost half a year of traveling together in relative isolation from the settled world. You start out in the usual manner— _your_ family, _your_ wagon, _your_ livestock, _your_ supplies. All you have in common, really, is a common goal... to go west to a new life. Little by little that begins to change and you begin to truly appreciate the concept of sharing... not just doing favors or lending and borrowing with the expectation of repayment... but _giving_ to your neighbors as they need and _accepting_ from them as you need. You soon learn that necessity comes before pride.

"If one of your oxen dies and you have no spare, your neighbor with two spares _gives_ you one. If you have a baby and your milk doesn't come in, your neighbor nurses your infant along with her own. If you've bagged two antelope but your neighbor's come back empty-handed, you _give_ him one so his family has meat on the table. Orphaned children are absorbed into other families.

"By the end of the trail you've become linked with one another through your shared experiences... you may not be related genetically but you've become _family_. Even though you go your separate ways and join or establish new communities, you never quite relinquish that feeling of interdependency, of responsibility, of being your brother's keeper even if—technically—he isn't your brother..."

 **Emmaline's narrative trailed off** as if her mind had drifted back into those long-ago times and Slim took advantage of the pause to speak. "Why are you telling me this now, Miss Emma?"

"Because, Matthew... I wish you to _understand_ why we're doing what you are incorrectly interpreting as meddling in your affairs. Our family and yours still maintain this bond I have just described. What's happened here is a most extraordinary confluence of unfortunate events... all of you being sick or injured at the same time! Remediation couldn't wait until you had recovered enough to think clearly... as your 'kin', we acted accordingly."

"What do you mean... 'couldn't wait'... what have you and Doc done? Besides all this, I mean... bringing the Koskis in to help with chores and the stock... you and Peach and Sally coming in to take care of us... which I _do_ appreciate, from the bottom of my heart, but..."

Young Doc took over. "Don't think for a minute you folks are the only ones in a bind... there're people all over this county in dire straits on account of this epidemic. We're not the only ones reaching out. Those who can are helping those who can't. I've got balls rolling in all directions, not just yours. We've got to move fast to ensure that people who're sick now and can't look after their own will be in decent shape come the first snowfall... which won't be long according to the old-timers. Elk are already moving down into the flats. They're saying could be just a few days we'll start seeing flurries."

"What kinds of balls?" Slim persisted, suspicious.

"We'll talk about that tomorrow as we planned... after you all come up with those lists..."

"Why not now?"

Emmaline stepped back in with a sigh. "We're not about to try telling you how to run your ranch... but Fred and I've come up with some ideas to help tide you over through this rough patch. We don't want to have to beat you over the head to get you to accept help, Matthew."

Slim was shaking his head, "Bottom line is, I have no idea where the money's gonna come from to pay for all this..."

"Who said anything about money?" Young Doc demanded. "You've helped so many folks out over the years and done so many favors... now it's their turn to help you and they're grateful for the privilege, believe me!"

"You know I don't like to call in favors, Freddy... I never intended to ask anyone for repayment. I don't need charity or hand-outs..." The stubborn face again.

"Well, that's what _community's_ all about—helping your neighbor in need... they've had their turns and now it's yours. Besides, it's not charity _per se_... I have a list of names... and no, you can't see it until tomorrow! I haven't asked _any_ of these people for anything, I promise you. Each and every name on that list is someone who knows of your difficulties and has volunteered of his or her own accord... labor, supplies, materials, what have you. Each one came to me and asked what he could do to help or just outright stated what he intended to do or contribute. These are your friends and neighbors who'd be offended if you refused their help. We just want you to be absolutely clear on that."

Slim's face reflected comprehension if not complete agreement. Yes, he was guilty of the sin of pride. He knew that. And if his mother were yet living he'd no doubt be on the receiving end of a similar lecture from her as well... with the added promise of a liberal application of the willow switch if he didn't straighten up and fly right. The thought made him grin.

 **In the meantime,** Jess had grown increasingly uncomfortable as the talk plunged deeper and deeper into Slim's personal business. As Miss Emma said, these people were family by longtime association with the Shermans and he wasn't. His hands eased down to the rims of the chair's wheels. Suddenly another bigger hand shot out and retarded the chair's backward progress with a stronger grip on the wheel.

"Oh no, you don't!" Slim exclaimed. "You're as much a part of this as anyone else so don't think you're getting off scot-free!"

"I got nothin' to do with this!" Jess protested. "Leggo... this ain't my business... I ain't your kin."

"Yes... you are... like it or not. When you threw in with us, you became part of this family and our community." Slim waggled a finger under Jess' nose. "You can't just walk off whenever you hear something you don't like. Everything the lady says is true... I guess I've always known that but just needed a kick in the rear as a reminder..."

"Didn't say I didn't like it," Jess said, looking away, "It's just I don't really understand it."

Jess raised his eyes to Emmaline's, head held high, shoulders squared back. Only Slim and Jonesy knew how difficult it was for this man to speak of his past. Even then they mostly sensed, rather than having been told, that their adoptee had no more point of reference to the societies in which they'd been raised than did a Zulu tribesman to the court of Queen Victoria. When Jess spoke, his voice had a catch in it and there was a definite glitter in his blue eyes.

"Miss Emma, my life... my family... we weren't like that at all. We didn't have a 'community' like you talked about. An' we dang sure had nothin' to share. I don't reckon you know what it's like to fight like a dog with your brothers an' sisters over a scrap of food. I never had any real schoolin'. I didn't learn to read an' write good 'til I was in a Yankee prisoner of war camp. One of the older fellers there, he started teachin' me just for somethin' to pass the time of day. Another feller... he had a Bible an' he read to us out of it. That's the only reason I know what little I do know about the words a the Good Book. An' that ain't sayin' much. I guess what I'm tryin' to say is... I don't know _how_ to be part of a family... or a community. I _wanna_ be. I just don't know _how_..."

 **Slim's and Jonesy's mouths** were both hanging open in wonder. This was the longest speech Jess had uttered in their presence since the day he'd arrived. Emmaline had been sitting calmly toward the other end of the table next to the pair of dishwashers who weren't getting much done, having been caught up in both her and Jess' monologues. Not once during Jess' speech did Emmaline's eyes leave his. When it was clear he'd said all he was going to, she responded.

"You are correct in that none of us at this table have had to endure such privations. But I offer to you the same advice as I've given Matthew... put the past behind, put your pride aside and accept our assistance in transitioning to a better life. You're an intelligent man. Whenever you have doubts about how to proceed in a social situation, don't hesitate to ask someone who knows... it's no different than learning anything else. And another thing..."

Whatever Emmaline had been about to expound on was interrupted by a resounding crash in the kitchen where Lychee'd been pecking away at the hingepins of the frozen door with an awl and hammer. Just as the last rusted pin yielded, the door fell inwards, knocking Peach to the floor. Three panes popped out and shattered. Instinctively Lychee leaped backwards against the work counter where one windmilling arm swept off an open sack of flour, a bowl of eggs and a pitcher of milk along with a stack of dried dishes. As the door bounced off the luckless cook, one corner landed directly on Lychee's right foot and another struck the water barrel, knocking it off its three-legged perch.

 **Sitting closest to the work area** and scrambling to get out of the way, Andy managed to upset both the basin of dishwater and the other one of rinse water. A tidal wave raced across the conjoined tabletops, spilling onto the laps of Jonesy, Emmaline, Young Doc and Slim, who leapt to their feet. In their rush to assist the fallen woman, they bumbled into one another... treading flour, eggs, milk, water and broken glass into a crunchy morass that coated the floor. Peach crawled out from under the door, cursing, Lychee was moaning, and everyone else was shouting. A number of salty words were bruited about. The finches, which up until then had been cheeping softly in their cage on the wall, contributed to the cacophony by flinging themselves against the bars, shrieking and scattering feathers and birdseed every which way.

Farthest away from the disaster zone and undrenched, Jess propelled himself backwards as far as he could get. The commotion had awakened Lily, who was adding to the din by doing what startled babies do. Kim was trying to quieten her but looked up as Jess shot past and slammed backwards against the front door, almost throwing himself forward out of the chair.

"Family!" Kim said, shaking his head dolefully.

"Community!" Jess said back.

They both grinned.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—PART TWO_

 **VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE**

" _ **I know the dark delight of being strange... the penalty of difference in the crowd..."**_ _(Claude McKay)_

 **9:00am...** Young Doc interrupted the intimate moment by darting between them to scoop from the fainting couch all the surviving towels that had been folded and piled there. A massive sopping-up was about commence in the kitchen.

"If you two have any sense you'll get as far away as you can!" He trotted back to the commotion in the kitchen.

"How far away does he think I can get in this contraption?" Jess scoffed.

Kim put the baby in the basket, stood up and stretched. "I'm thinking front porch if we can get it through the door..."

"Might as well give it a try... cold out there?"

"Not bad. Jackets oughta do... which one's yours?"

 _(_ _ **Gracie's commentary...**_ _These two individuals didn't know it yet, but they were about to embark on one of the most extraordinary conversations of their young lives... one which would lead to a life-long association and—many years from now—a closer affiliation of a sort neither could have imagined possible in his wildest dream. But first they had to get past that awkward interlude of getting to know each other, which is difficult enough when you share a common ethnicism, culture and nationality. Subtract those three factors, add in their recent adversarial encounters, and the conversation is likely going to get off to a lumpy and hesitant start—each wishing to satisfy his curiosity about the other without being nosy or impolite.)_

 **Jess pointed out** his lightweight canvas jacket and Kim helped him into it, handing him one of the clean quilts from the pile to tuck around his waist and legs. It was big enough to cover the bare foot of the elevated leg. Locating his own coat among the several hanging on the pegs, Kim immediately encountered an aggravation—a bit snug to begin with, it was even more so now. Surely he couldn't have put on _that_ much weight in such a short time... he'd hardly eaten anything for days! The problem seemed to be a constriction about the chest and shoulders, which he soon deduced was due to the added bulk of the bindings around his upper chest and shoulder. Sighing, he returned it to the peg and transferred the contents of its pockets to another larger garment. In Slim's more capacious jacket he looked like a little boy playing dress up in his daddy's clothes.

Kim fussed over the baby, bundling her in miniature quilts and adjusting her tiny knitted wool cap on her head. He then restored her to the basket and set it in Jess' lap.

"Here... you hang onto Lily." Opening the front door, Kim set about trying to maneuver the wheelchair out the door. It was much heavier nor did it roll as easily as he'd imagined and the extended leg support kept getting in the way. First he tried pulling it out backwards as Jess already had his back to the door. When that didn't work he tried backing and filling to get it turned around. In so doing he felt a burning sensation in his shoulder and an ominous flash of pain from his midsection. He was struggling to get the wheels over the sill when Young Doc caught him at it and yelled.

"What the hell're you doing?! You trying to kill yourself?!" Pushing Kim aside he forced the chair out onto the porch and rolled it to the far end, deftly spinning it back around so that Jess was facing west with a view toward the barn and corral. He then dragged the rocking chair over and positioned it at a right angle to the wheelchair. Taking the basket from Jess, he set it on the floor between the chairs.

"You!" Young Doc pointed a finger at Kim. "Get over here and sit. Don't let me catch you doing anything like that again... wouldn't be surprised if you've ripped some stitches... but it'll have to keep 'til we're done cleaning up in there." Young Doc's tone turned unexpectedly solicitous. "Shoulder hurting bad?"

"More than I'd like. Good thing I've got these broken ribs to take my mind off of it."

"If you can crack jokes about it then it can't be too bad, but I'll give you some laudanum if you want..."

"Thanks but no on the laudanum. The side effects are worse than the pain."

"How about you, Jess... how's the leg today?"

"It don't hurt near's much as the first time I broke it. 'Course I didn't have no cast like this one on it and every time I moved it felt like it were on fire. This one just aches a little... except not right now."

"Good, good... that's what I want to hear. I'll be back..." Young Doc turned and went back inside.

 **Jess closed his eyes** and took in a deep lungful of crisp morning air... his first in six days. Fresh air'd never tasted so good. When he opened them again it was to find Kim abstractedly gazing out toward the pasture, moccasined feet propped against one of the vertical rails, his face pale and strained. He sure didn't look like he was enjoying the morning very much, though, the way he was squirming around in his seat trying to find a comfortable position and clearly favoring the injured shoulder. Jess could surely sympathize with the agony of broken ribs, having stove up a couple of his own a time or two... and the ignominy of having to depend on the ministrations of strangers when misfortune put you in a position where you couldn't look after yourself. That, too, was a circumstance he'd experienced many times in the past five years. Yeah, so... he had a busted leg and that was no picnic... but at least _he_ was surrounded by _family._

It came to Jess that this was the first clear look he'd had at the other man in broad daylight and also the first time they'd been alone together in a non-adversarial state. A good time to ask questions, of which he had aplenty! But the code of manly Western men forbade casual inquiries of a personal nature so he couldn't very well just blurt them out—he wasn't _that_ socially-challenged. It was different with women—put together two women who've never before met and five minutes later they've exchanged life histories, the names and ages of their children, a dozen recipes and a parcel of quilt scraps. Why _was_ that? What was so wrong with one man showing a little friendly interest in another, especially one who escaped categorization in any known slot? Because... in Jess' world, _different_ had always meant potentially dangerous.

Through hard experience Jess had learned the value of caution and reserve in revealing too much about himself to a new acquaintance, had learned to dole out personal information in carefully measured proportion to what was offered by that other individual, had learned not to accept affable natures and friendly faces as markers of trustworthiness. Too many times he'd been stabbed in the back, literally and figuratively, by new 'friends'—including those of the feminine persuasion. Even now, after five months in the Sherman household, he still clung to that reserve, that need to keep his innermost feelings shielded. The downside was that if you didn't ask, you didn't learn. He reminded himself that when he first got here, he was _different_ , too... and perceived as dangerous. But now that he'd been around a while...

It occurred to Jess that, although in his travels he'd encountered many persons of mixed race, there were only a handful he'd bothered to get to know well... like Cory Lake, Slim's half-Cheyenne friend, and Lindsay McNutt, of course... only because Lychee was an occasional visitor to the ranch in his capacity of family lawyer, and the few times Jess had accompanied Slim to Lychee's office in town. He _knew_ what they were—half-Injun and half-Chink, respectively. What he _didn't_ know was what, exactly, was this man sitting next to him... and the not-knowing was irritating, like a pebble in his boot.

He reviewed what he _did_ know so far, either overheard or been told outright: the tattoo symbolism (he had yet to see that dadgum thing for himself and wanted to!), that Kim had _no_ Injun blood (according to Miss Emma and Kim's own admission) but he might have or probably did have Oriental blood and spoke the lingo (a screechy tongue that hurt Jess' ears and sounded like tomcats fighting in a gunny sack), that they shared the same birthday and were the same age (although to his mind the other looked to be still wet behind the ears), that he was educated (something Jess would deride in public, having often joshed Slim about his high-falutin' speech and ways, but privately admired). Preoccupied with these ruminations, he didn't even notice Kim's head swivel in his direction until he spoke...

"What?"

Jess flinched. "What? I didn't say anything..."

"I know. But you're looking at me like a frog you've just dissected in biology class..."

"Huh?"

"Forget it! What's on your mind?"

"Oh... nuthin', really... I... uh... I was jus'..." To heck with it, Jess thought. Might as well be hung for a horse thief as a chicken stealer...

" **Kin I ask you a personal question?"**

Kim arched an eyebrow. "You may _ask_..." Two hens hopped up on the porch to investigate the basket. Kim gingerly lowered one foot and kicked them away in a flurry of feathers and cackles of indignation. The effort made him grimace. " _But..._ then I get to ask one... deal?"

Jess considered this before responding slowly. "Fair enough, I guess."

"Good. You go first..."

"I been wonderin'... I done met all kinda halfbreeds—mulattoes, Injuns, Messicans... oh... and Chinee like Lychee and Young Doc's kids... but you don't look like none of 'em. So... what _are_ you?"

Kim gave him a pained look. "I've already explained this to Andy. I don't know why you all are so interested in my ancestry. Where I come from there's hardly anyone who's pure anything... there's hundreds more who look just like me and none of us are _half_ anything. The answer is, I'm a mixture of French-Italian, Chinese, Melanesian and Polynesian."

Jess' eyebrows crinkled in concentration. Frogs, dagos, chinks... these he knew (just as he knew not to use these derogatory terms in polite company). But _kneesions?_ This was something new. He opened his mouth to ask another question...

"My go..." Kim said firmly. "What's it like, being an outlaw... a professional gunfighter?"

His mouth still hanging open, Jess wasn't too sure how to answer. Or even if he had one. And he for dang sure didn't much like that question... one of those loaded ones like 'do you still beat your wife?' No matter the answer, still an admission of prior guilt. True... he'd hired out his fast gun in the past... but he'd never before viewed that activity from such a brutal standpoint... and—also true—that same fast gun had been employed in quite a few confrontations where the primary consideration was survival rather than monetary gain. Did that make him a 'professional'?

"I ain't no outlaw," he finally choked out.

"My mistake," Kim said blandly. "I was told you're a gunslinger with a big reputation. I just assumed all gunfighters operated outside the law. Perhaps I was misinformed."

"I ain't no criminal, neither," Jess defended himself. "I been on the wrong side of the law a couple of times and done some jail time but... I don't do that no more... gunfightin', I mean."

"Sure could've fooled me," Kim murmured, raising a hand to his shoulder and wincing. "How does a fellow get into that line of work, anyway? Was that what you always wanted to be when you grew up?"

At any time previously or with any other of his peers Jess might've taken exception to a smartass question like that, but he couldn't sense any sarcasm behind Kim's query, only a genuine curiosity. He sensed, without quite understanding, that here he was dealing with an individual who inhabited a world of social structures totally alien to anything with which Jess was familiar. For that reason—and only that reason—the Texan felt compelled to relate personal history he normally kept to himself... things he hadn't even yet felt comfortable enough to share with Slim.

Jess looked down, studying his hands and the fingers that never stopped moving. He spoke softly. "Never thought much about what I wanted to be when I grew up 'cause I kinda figured I'd be dead before I got there. All I ever done was chop cotton 'til the war come along. Then I ran away from home an' joined up. Weren't but sixteen then. Four months short of twenty-one when it was all over. Family all dead. Didn't have a home to go home to. All I knew was the gun... an' I was good at it."

"I can't even begin to imagine what that must have been like, Jess. There's been no war in my life... not much strife of any kind..."

"We... the South, I mean... we didn't just lose the war... we lost everything. Crops all destroyed, livestock gone, no workin' farms, no businesses, no jobs to be had nowhere, families starvin'. Only folks had any money were from up north... come down to take what they could get from other folks what had their hearts an' souls ripped out of 'em. They offered top pay for guns to help 'em hold on to what they'd stole..." Jess shrugged. "I sorta fell into doin' what I did best. I ain't proud a workin' for profiteers but a man's gotta eat. Can't live on pride. That answer your question?" He hoped he was able to keep from his voice the belligerence he was feeling.

Kim's expression seemed to reflect commiseration that some men really hadn't had many... or any... choices about the directions their lives had taken. He was nodding thoughtfully.

"Yes, it does. Thank you for explaining."

"I'm tryin' to put that life behind me here. Tryin' to be just an ordinary ranch hand mindin' my own business an' gettin' by. Folks just won't let it be, though. A rep always finds you no matter where you try to hide... but you already know that..."

"Do I?"

"Think I can't tell when someone's on the run? Here you are... not lookin' like us, no place to go... not from around here an' a real long ways from home—wherever that might be." Jess was itching to ask the big question... which was: _What're you runnin' from?_ But that would be going too far.

Instead he added, "Believe me... I been there. I know what it's like..."

"Yeah... well... this is my first time. I'm still learning the ropes."

"You ain't goin' to learn much more or get too far without packin' irons."

"Guns wouldn't do me any good. Can't hit the side of a barn."

"I could teach you, you want... looks like you're gonna be here a spell."

"Thanks. I might take you up on that sometime. I think it's your turn..."

" **How come you don't carry no sidearm?"** A perfectly logical and legitimate question from Jess' point of view as just about every redblooded male in the territory went around armed, aside from some townfolk.

"I didn't think I needed one. But the longer I'm in this country, the more I'm beginning to see the prudence in having one."

"Whaddya do where you're from... don't you hunt game and such? Even a man what don't carry usually keeps a shotgun or a rifle for varmints an' game for the table."

Kim shook his head. "Don't have much call for firearms at home since we mostly eat fish. There aren't any predatory mammals and no game birds. If we want meat, we hunt feral pigs and cattle with spears. Granted, there's more guns around now that so many American entrepreneurs have moved in and started up plantations—and they hunt with rifles—but the natives don't have any."

"Natives? You mean like the Injuns here?" Jess was getting powerful curious himself. What strange kind of land did this man come from?

"Exactly like your Indians... and just like yours, our numbers are shrinking rapidly. Maybe one or two more generations and we'll be gone."

"What about when folks get to fightin'? Whadda they fight with... sticks and stones?"

Kim chuckled. "You're not too far off... the warrior caste have a whole arsenal of specialized weapons... long and short spears, clubs with stones or shark teeth, knives... all quite lethal, I can assure you. Everyone carries a knife... even women and children... mostly for gutting fish and cutting fruit, though."

"You know how to use them warrior things?"

"In theory. They wouldn't have me in their club—too white for their liking," Kim said matter-of-factly.

"What do white folks fight with, then?"

"Oh... they have guns but mostly they do each other in with knives."

Jess was plumb fascinated. He couldn't possibly allow these intriguing bits of intel to slip through the cracks... what kind of place was this? Didn't sound like any state he'd ever heard of.

"You think of yourself as a... not as a white man?"

"Depends on where I am, who I'm with and what I'm doing. Right now I'm being white. At home I'd be native."

 **In the short time they'd been talking,** the sun had warmed up the front porch so that both men were now too warm... they wiggled out of their jackets. Kim was wearing one of Slim's old castoff shirts, untucked, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The faded blue and green floral design from its former existence as a flour sack now sported a small crimson splotch up near the left shoulder. Kim didn't seem to notice it but Jess did. He thought about mentioning it but didn't.

"Ain't it your turn for a question?"

"So it is... What was all that about—back there at the table—about community and Slim not wanting to accept help?"

"Didn't know you was listenin'... thought you was asleep."

"No, I heard every word."

"I guess what it boils down to is money..." Jess went on to explain, as best he understood, the concerns about winter coming on, mortgage payments, expenses rising and money being in short supply... "an' there's me... another mouth to feed an' useless in the bargain. An' now there's you... sorry... didn't mean for that to sound like it came out, but yeah... I'd say Slim's got a right to be worried... he's got a lot on his plate right now an' he's too proud to ask for help... he don't like bein' beholdin' to anyone."

"I see... so if finances weren't an issue...?"

"I don't rightly see how to get around it 'less he robs a bank. Wish I could fix it for him... he's been mighty good to me... took in a no-count drifter, treated me like kin, gimme a home... I owe him more'n I can ever repay..." Jess' voice broke. Kim deftly changed the subject.

"What else would you like to know? I have a feeling you're not done yet..."

"Well... um... whaddya do? For a livin', I mean..."

"At the moment I appear to be just another homeless drifter, but in real life I'm a hydrology engineer."

"I reckon I don't know what that is," Jess admitted.

"I study water, Jess... where it is, where it comes from, how to get at it, how to control it and the best use for it once you've got it... that's what landed me in my immediate predicament... I stopped to admire that nice little lake in that double box canyon and my horse made an error in judgment. If I'd just kept on going, if he hadn't gone over the edge and rolled on me, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be long gone. But that's life for you... fortune and chance."

" **I got one more question,"** Jess ventured shyly. "I remember you sayin' the other day you was a visitor to this country... so you ain't American?"

"I'm from an island called Maui."

Jess chortled. "Sounds like a cat."

"MOW-EE." Kim articulated. "It's in the Hawai'ian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, at one hundred fifty-six degrees latitude and on the twentieth parallel north—same as Mexico City... and you have no idea where I'm talking about, do you?"

As a matter of fact, Jess _didn't_... he'd heard of Hawaii but didn't have a clue what it was or even where it was other than some place between California and China.

Kim sighed and continued. "Hawai'i is a constitutional monarchy so, technically, I'm a subject of King Kamehameha the Fifth. For all practical purposes, though, Americans are now running the government. I expect at some time in the future the monarchy'll be overthrown and we'll be annexed as another territory... just like they did with Alaska. Except they'll just take it, not buy it."

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Jess commented.

"It'll certainly change the environment I grew up in," Kim agreed. "And not necessarily for the better. Like Mister Darwin says, you either adapt or die. The indigenous population most likely will be squeezed out. The white colonists won't get to enjoy their autonomy much longer, either. It's people like me who'll survive the transition."

Jess didn't have all that good a grasp of politics in general, being more conversant with the down-to-earth, day-to-day realities of life. "What's it like, livin' on a island?"

 **"Same as living anywhere else,** except you don't travel very far in any one direction. Maui's the second largest of one hundred thirty-seven islands in the chain, mostly volcanic seamounts that've erupted above sea level. It's actually two seamounts connected by an isthmus—so there's West Maui, a smaller oval, and East Maui, a bigger one. Both have a leeward side where it's hot and dry and a windward side where it's cooler and rainier."

"How big is it?" Jess was using as his reference the forty-six square miles of the only island he'd ever been on—Galveston Island on the Gulf of Mexico.

"Oh... roughly seven hundred and thirty square miles, give or take—that works out to about four hundred sixty-five thousand acres."

"Why, we got bigger ranches in Texas where I come from!" Jess scoffed... at the same time wondering how a man could get himself born and raised in such a constrained land mass.

"There's only one real town—Lāhainā—on West Maui. Used to be a pretty busy whaling port until that business petered out. The island's now mostly gone over to sugarcane production. There aren't any roads except the ones between town and the plantations. Elsewhere the settlements are strung out along the coastline so the only way to get from one to another is on foot or by horse, or else you sail around. The climate is temperate all year round and it rains a lot. Every now and then we might get some snow and ice in the mountains."

"You have mountains?"

"Not like your mountains here... ours are dormant volcanoes... but the upper slopes are pretty rugged."

This was actually a little too much information for Jess and he was struggling to keep up—he had a hard enough time with North American geography much less the rest of the world. But he was hooked. He noted that Kim's face had relaxed some, become more animated, while describing his homeland—another feeling Jess could own up to. Even though the Texas of his childhood had been a sere, unforgiving environment for a poor family trying to scratch out a living from the land, it was still 'home' in his mind, his place of birth.

 **"What's your home like?"** he persisted. "Does it look like this?" He waved around to encompass the Sherman compound.

Kim laughed. "No... nothing at all like this. My family's got three thousand acres under sugarcane cultivation on the leeward side and I've got about eight hundred acres on the windward side of East Maui."

Now Jess knew sugarcane all right... and loathed it. Some years, when cotton yields were thin and farmers weren't hiring, his family had been reduced to working canefields. It was hot, backbreaking and dangerous—even lower in the social pecking order than cotton field laborers... fit only for slaves and the poorest of white trash. And now that there were no slaves, the American South's sugarcane industry was bust... or so he'd heard. A vision lodged itself in his mind: a balconied and porticoed, green-shuttered and white-columned Big House. An overfed planter and his dainty hoop-skirted helpmeet being attended by silent barefooted darkies... white-gloved or turbaned according to gender.

"Your slaves ain't freed like ours was?" His voice was low, almost a growl.

Kim raised his eyebrows. "We don't have slaves... never have. But we've got something almost as bad... indentured workers, mostly Chinese. Their living and working conditions are appalling... probably worse than your blacks endured because at least slaves were considered valuable. I don't approve but I have no say in the matter on the family property. I don't have any indentured people on my own land."

"Who works your crops, then? Sharecroppers?" The gravelly voice got even more hoarse.

"I guess you could call them that... only four families. But it's more of a traditional communal operation. The head of one of the families is my overseer when I'm not there."

The word 'overseer' conjured up unpleasant memories for the former sharecropper's son... hatchet-faced pot-bellied brutes on high-stepping Tennessee Walkers, who carried shotguns and bullwhips. Men who didn't hesitate to lay a stripe across the back of fieldworker not moving quickly enough—black or white.

As Kim couldn't read Jess' mind, he remained unaware of the other's discomfiture and continued his description.

 **"My land is a little north of Hāna proper,** where there're six cane plantations and a small settlement with a little general store. There's a Catholic mission and school—all our kids go there up through grade six. The planters went in together to build a dock so lighters can load cut cane to take to the mills on the leeward side. A mail packet puts in once a week with staples like flour and rice, and whatever we can't make ourselves. We grow most of our own produce, and raise chickens and goats. There's a sort of path to the settlement, more of a pig trail than a road, just big enough for a pony cart. Got a few riding horses, too.

"Except for the headland on the ocean front, my property's mostly jungle and steep hillside... not suitable for cane so we planted coffee instead and it's doing well. Everything stays green all year round and fresh fruits and vegetables are always available—banana, papaya, mango, guava, breadfruit, sweet potato, taro and yams, coconuts, kukui and macadamia nuts. The younger kids gather these for their mamas. All kinds of seafood, of course—the older ones go fishing almost every day. I go with when I can... I love to fish…"

"So do I!" Jess exclaimed. "I'd fish every day if I could. That'd be the life for me!"

"There's five bungalows on the headland... all about the same size, with thatched roofs and wraparound _lānais_ —that's like a verandah—where we do most of our living and sleeping. They all face the ocean so they catch the breeze... there's always a breeze. We have a community garden and a central kitchen and bathhouse. The women all pitch in together with the children and domestic stuff so we don't have any servants as such. When I'm there I work alongside the men in the coffee terraces and in our experimental pineapple field."

"Sounds like the Garden of Eden," Jess commented.

"About as close as a man can get in this world," Kim sighed. "I'd stay there and never leave if I could."

"Well, why can't you?"

"Gotta work sometime, and my office is in my townhouse in Lāhainā, where my wife and kids live."

"Hold on jus' a dadgummed minute... I thought you said your family lived in..."

"That's my _other_ family. Ysabel stays in Lāhainā with our three kids... she has no use for plantation life and refuses to go there. Pélé stays at the Hāna house with the other four... she doesn't have any use for the big city… _or_ Ysabel, for that matter. They don't get along."

 **Jess was totally gobsmacked.** _Two wives? Just how far do these damned Mormons propose to spread out? They've already overrun Utah!_

"You're a Mormon?" he squeaked.

Kim frowned. "No. I'm a Catholic."

"But... but... two wives and _seven_ kids?" Jess sputtered, this incoming data completely bogging down the mental works.

"Seven. All girls…"

The animation that'd been carrying Kim's side of the conversation seemed to be petering out and he fell silent. Jess wished he hadn't brought up the subject of home and family. Earlier, both had got too warm and shrugged out of their jackets, whereupon Jess'd noticed a red splotch developing high on Kim's shoulder. So Young Doc'd been right—some stitches must've come loose. As Kim didn't seem to be exhibiting any discomfort, Jess decided to not say anything about it… unless it got worse.


	28. Chapter 28

_CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT—PART ONE_

 **PRAYER MEETIN'**

" _ **God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many**_

 _ **bad actors who don't know how to play funny."**_ _(Garrison Keillor)_

 **Tiger Lily woke up then** and started bawling. Kim reached down for the basket only to find he didn't have the strength in his left arm to lift it. Only then did he notice the state of his shirt and went pale. Thinking Kim was about to pass out, Jess opened his mouth to holler for Young Doc. Kim shook his head.

"I'll be okay… don't bother him."

The baby's squalls brought the doctor to the threshold anyway. "What's wrong?"

Kim hastily pulled the jacket over his shoulder to cover the bloody spot, trying to act nonchalant.

Giving Kim a penetrating look, Doc leaned over and lifted the baby from her basket, jamming an experienced finger down her diaper and pronouncing high tide. "Don't get up… I'll take care of this and bring her right back."

In the meantime, Peach appeared, lugging a straightback chair over the threshhold and dispensing a string of strident Cantonese maledictions. Behind her hopped Lychee on Jess' future crutches, his left foot mummified in wrappings. Peach dragged the chair over to Kim's and Jess' corner, placing it with the back to the railing. Without pausing for breath she bowed to Jess, then to Kim. Shaking her fist at her son, she pushed past him back into the house, still griping.

Lychee thumped over and sat down in the straightback chair.

"Hey... them's _my_ crutches!" Jess protested.

"Don't get your chaps in a lather," Lychee said. "You don't need 'em yet."

"What happened to you?" Kim asked Lychee.

"Three broken metatarsals is what... when the damned door fell on my foot. At least Ma waited until Freddy was through fixing me up before she threw me out here with the rest of you cripples."

Jess found that exceedingly funny even if he didn't know a metatarsal from a mongoose.

Slim and Andy came out the front kitchen door—or rather, the empty doorframe, carrying the door between them.

"About time somebody did some work around here!" Jess yelled after them, getting a finger from Slim in return. Both he and Andy had changed into dry clothes. They turned toward the forge.

 **Lychee lifted his nose and sniffed,** nostrils dilating. "Jeez... what's that stench?"

"Don't look at me!" Kim said, pointing at Jess. "It's coming from him... Mister Silent But Deadly."

"Hey... I didn't poot!" Jess exclaimed with indignance.

Lychee pretended to fan the air back in Jess' direction. "Whoooeeee, Jess! You smell like a French whorehouse!"

"Like a Barbadian bordello!" Kim agreed.

"Spanish seraglio!" Lychee added.

"Belgian brothel!" Kim hooted.

"Chinese cathouse!" Lychee snickered.

"Brazilian bawdyhouse!" Kim threw in.

"British bagnio!" Lychee snorted.

"Korean knockingshop!" Kim added.

"German hurenhaus!" Lychee countered.

"Hey... no fair! I don't know German!" Kim objected.

"Oh ha ha... very funny!" Jess countered, defending himself. "I smell just like Miss Emma and she smells real nice..."

Kim was bent over choking and grimacing, one arm folded against his ribs and the other hand holding his shoulder. "Owww! Owwwww! Stop! Don't make me laugh." Which was when Young Doc caught him

"Looks like you're nanny..." he said, handing the baby and a bottle over to Jess. Turning, he hooked a hand under Kim's good arm, hoisting him up unceremoniously. "You come with me." He hadn't been fooled for a minute.

 **Lychee immediately appropriated** the rocker, propping his throbbing foot on the seat of the straightback chair. Interesting situation, this... the first time _ever_ he'd been left alone in Jess' company... a scenario he'd often salaciously envisioned, but not under _these_ circumstances. Still... it cost nothing to dream. He wasn't entirely sure that Jess Harper even _knew_...

Neither Lindsay McNutt nor Luca Giancomo were overt about their preferences, either in appearance or in manner. Not too many people around Laramie _did_ know. Family members did, of course—as well as all the girls at the Prairie Rose who were sworn to secrecy because they held Lucky the Artist in such high regard. They were all above-average attractive, but Lucky's sable brushes rendered them as goddesses on canvas.

Sally—whom both he and Luca considered as their older sister-cousin—was in fact the only person to whom Lychee had ever formally 'come out.' When he and Freddy and Luca were infants, two-years-older Sally had played with them as if they were her doll babies. In his late teens and plagued with worries about his and Luca's 'difference' from other boys, it was to Sally he'd turned. Sally dispensed wise counsel: 'Boys... you'll always be what you are... but at the same time you must understand this: Your kind of difference will never be tolerated in our lifetime... perhaps in a big city like New York or San Francisco, or over in Europe, but not _here_ —not in America's heartland. Here you have to blend in. My advice to you is follow your heart but be discreet about it.' He knew then, as he knew now, that she was right. However, Lychee continued to harbor a faint hope that someday he'd be free to walk in the sunshine with someone he loved.

Jess was totally absorbed with Lily—cuddling her in one arm, holding the bottle with his other hand, looking down into her big brown eyes, coocheecooing like an infatuated postpartum mother. As evidently there was to be no adult conversation in the offing, Lychee had to content himself with just looking at Jess looking at the baby... dreaming about what would never be...

A disturbance at the door proved to be Peach again—this time dragging one of the fireside rockers out to the porch, Jonesy hobbling right behind her. She was barking at him and he was woofing right back. ( _Buddha on a bicycle! My mother's teaching that old fart Cantonese swear words!)_ In short order Jonesy was established against the wall on the other side of the door.

 **Some minutes later Young Doc returned,** guiding a glazed-eye, wobbly Kim by the elbow.

"Give Kim back the rocker, Leech... he needs it worse than you do!"

If Kim's face was pale before, it was positively fishbelly white now, with pink-rimmed eyes and a reddened nose with a smudge of crusted blood between nostrils and upper lip. He was in another of Slim's old shirts, but this time with his arm in a sling and immobilized against his chest. Lychee ungraciously yielded the rocker and Young Doc deposited his patient in it.

The physician was grinding his teeth. "Wouldn't have the laudanum... oh no! Would rather faint and bash his schnozz on the table than be sensible!"

"He fainted?" Jess looked up.

"Like a girl," Young Doc acknowledged. "Soon's I took that first stitch."

"Hurt like a sumbitch," Kim mumbled. "Didn't hurt that bad before..."

"You were unconscious the first time, you imbecile!"

"Leave me be..." Kim muttered. "I'll be fine in a minute."

From across the yard could be heard the hacking of someone in the throes of a ragged coughing fit. Young Doc jerked his head and swore. "Dammitall! Is there no end to this?!" He stomped down the stairs and loped toward the forge.

 **Here came Peach again,** lugging an empty bucket and a fifty-pound burlap sack of big brown oblate potatoes. Her boss was toting a bucket of water and four shallow tin basins with paring knives rattling around in them. Peach tipped potatoes into the bucket until it was full, setting it between Lychee, Jess and Kim. The remainder she left in the sack and placed near Jonesy

"No sense in all these idle hands sitting around doing nothing!" Emmaline announced. "We need all of these peeled and quartered for tonight's cheese and potato soup. Throw the quarters in the water so they won't turn brown. Throw the peelings out to the chickens."

"Jess has his hands full," Lychee observed dryly, "and how's Kim going to peel with one arm?"

"That bottle looks near about empty and Kim can hold a potato in his left hand without moving his arm. Jess, when the child's done put her back in the basket and get to work." Emmaline distributed basins and knives and bustled back indoors with a "Come along, Peach. _We_ have to get lunch started."

Lychee leaned over and selected a potato. With knife firmly grasped in his right hand, he examined the tuber in his left as one might a rare and unusual archeological find.

"Um... which end do you start with?" he asked tentively. Lychee had never peeled a potato in his life.

"Don't matter," Jonesy said. "Just start at one end or t'other and peel your way 'round, like an apple." He was already almost done with his first one, the neat brown spiral descending into the basin in his lap.

"Easier to do 'em in strips from one end to the other," was Kim's opinion. Lychee tried both ways and decided Kim's was easier. He'd tossed his second set of quarters into the water bucket when Jonesy noticed the eyes hadn't been picked out.

"Say what?"

"The eyes... these things... you gotta pick 'em out with the point of your knife."

"Well nobody said..."

"Boy... don't you know nothin' 'bout spuds?"

"No. Why should I? I'm a lawyer, not a kitchen maid!"

"You youngsters think there's always been women out West?"Jonesy said, shaking his head mournfully. "Why, I betcha I peeled a million taters by now. Back in the fifties and sixties, when I was a trail cook..."

For the next fifteen minutes the captive audience peeled industriously if not efficiently as Jonesy spun one of his long-winded tales.

 **The trouble started with Lily...** she'd been sucking on that bottle like it was the last one in the universe. When she suddenly stopped, her little face screwed up and her forehead crinkled. She started squirming and fussing like she about to cry. Jess knitted his eyebrows.

"Hey... she quit drinkin' and now she don't look too happy... whats'at mean?"

"Probably needs burping," Kim said without looking up. One-armed potato peeling wasn't as easy as Emmaline apparently thought it was. "She needs to be held up so the air comes out."

"Air?"

"They swallow a lot of air when they're nursing... it has to come out."

"Oh... right."

Carefully setting the bottle down on the floor, Jess held Lily upright at face level with a hand under each arm.

"Not like that!" Kim spoke sharply. "Support her head. Put her up against your shoulder and pat her on the back..."

From just around the corner and out of sight floated the jingles of harness brasses and the clip-clopping of many hooves on the road. It was a bad time for Jess to be distracted... he cocked his head to listen.

"Someone's comin'..."

"...gently," Kim concluded, just as Lily produced a forceful gastroesophageal explosion of curdled milk that coated Jess' face and ran down his shirt front.

" _Noooooooooooo!"_ Jess gagged as the gorge rose. He thrust her toward his nearest seatmate. "Take her!"

Lychee recoiled as if offered a live rattlesnake. _"What? Noooooooooo...!"_ He'd never held an infant before and wasn't about to start now.

" _TAKE HER NOW!"_ Jess demanded, eyes bulging. _"I'm gonna throw up!"_

Lychee dropped the knife and the partly peeled potato and took Lily, holding her as if he'd just been handed a rabid puppy. The basin of peelings spilled from his lap.

Kim was shouting frantically, dropping his own basin and knife... _"SUPPORT HER HEAD! SUPPORT HER HEAD!"_

Pushing up against the arms of the chair in an effort to turn his head sideways and over the railing, Jess half rose from the seat. The cast slipped off the support, heel slamming to the floor. A lightning bolt of pain shot up his leg. Responding to Newton's Third Law of Motion, the brakeless wheelchair flew backwards off the porch where there wasn't a railing and landed upside down, its wheels spinning in the air. Jess'd slid out, the back of his head connecting solidly with the floor and his good foot with the pail of potatoes nearest Lychee. Potatoes skittered all over that end of the porch. Jess was out cold, having added—on the way down—his own vomitus to the infant's.

And that's when Lucky's mule-drawn buckboard hove into sight, accompanied by three outriders.

 **The commotion brought Young Doc,** Slim and Andy running from the forge. Peach hurtled through the door, where she immediately skidded on a carpet of peelings all the way to the railing, knocking over Jonesy's sack of potatoes in the process. A veritable cascade of Idaho's finest bounced down the stairs and into the yard. Galloping directly behind Peach, Emmaline stepped in one of the tin basins and turned her ankle, plowing right into the tiny cook/housekeeper. The railing gave way under their combined weight, dumping both women ass over teakettle into the rose bushes.

Kim threw aside his basin of peelings and dropped to his knees next to Jess, trying to find a pulse in the other's neck. Forgetting he didn't have a second arm with which to brace himself, he pitched off the porch, landing flat on his back next to the wheelchair. The impact with the hard-packed dirt knocked the wind out of him. Chest constricting with pain and unable to draw breath, darkness enveloped him.

Slim had come to a halt halfway across the yard, wracked with coughing spasms and hunched over with hands on knees. First to reach the porch, Young Doc and Andy found forward progress retarded as they encountered the minefield of potatoes.

 **Lucky did a double take** as he reined the team into the yard, recognizing one of the two pairs of bloomered legs scissoring skyward as belonging to his mother, who was expressing her dissatisfaction in some of the bluest language ever heard this side of the Mississippi. He leaped off the still moving conveyance and bounded to his mama's rescue. Peach was rivaling her employer in shrill Cantonese but no one had trouble getting the gist.

Lychee stood up—uncertainly balancing his armload of bawling baby. Young Doc scrambled up on the porch, intent on getting to Jess. In one smooth lateral pass (retained from his rugby days playing wing for Edinburgh) he whisked the child away from Lychee and deposited her in the basin in Jonesy's lap.

Lychee then fell to his knees and reached out to grab one of Peach's skinny ankles. He was a strong man and if not podiatrically disabled could probably have lifted out his diminutive mother easily with one arm... but she was well and truly stuck. Off the porch he went, landing sideways in the rosebushes between Peach and Emmaline.

Andy was mired in indecision—torn between rushing to his hero's aid or returning to his brother who appeared to be coughing up a lung. Or should he help Lucky disentangle the two women? Slim had taught him a lady in distress was _always_ a gentleman's first priority. He trotted around to the victims in the rose bushes.

 **Meanwhile, Sheriff Mort Corey** and his two companions reined up a prudent distance from the scene of carnage, their mounts understandably nervous about getting too close to all these berserk humans. At fifty years of age with almost thirty years of law enforcement service under his belt, Laramie's town sheriff, Morton Ames Corey, was not an excitable man and rarely given to fits of hilarity. At the moment, however, it was all he could do to keep his face neutral when every fiber of his being was straining to let it out. He hadn't seen such a display of utter buffoonery since the last tent revival came to town.

The sheriff dismounted stiffly, handing the reins to one of the other men, and strolled over to where the red-faced rancher was bent over gasping for breath.

Slim looked up at Corey sideways, speaking with the hoarsest of croaks. "Hey... Mort... what... brings... you... out... this... way?"

The sheriff cleared his throat in an attempt to quell the laughter that was welling up. This was not a funny situation. Slim was obviously sick. People were obviously injured. He should be offering to help instead of standing here like a nitwit.

"I... uh... didn't mean to interrupt your prayer meetin', Slim... but... ah... oh hell!" A chuckle tried to escape. He held it back. He knew if he started laughing he wouldn't be able to stop.

Slim gave his old friend a quizzical look inbetween coughs. _Prayer meeting?_ He then glanced in the direction of the porch where the two women had now been uprighted, skirts decorously restored to their proper position. Emmaline was angrily gesticulating in a cloud of extremely ripe commentary.

"Good Lord! Is that Madam... er, Missus Giancomo?" Corey exclaimed. "What's she...? Never mind... I probably don't want to know."

"Water... need... water..." Slim choked, pointing in the direction of the well pump. Corey obligingly fetched his friend a dipperful and waited patiently until Slim gathered his composure and was able to stand upright, though shakily. Corey took his arm and, kicking potatoes out of the way, escorted him to the front porch where he sat down heavily on the steps. Corey remained standing, but motioned his two companions to approach.

"If you gentlemen don't mind a short interruption, these folks could use some help... tie up the horses over by the trough there..."

The men did so and returned to the porch. Recognizing one of them as a representative of the Great Central Overland Mail Company, Slim's heart sank and his gut clenched. There could be only one reason for this person's presence—he was here to advise closure of the route...

Sheriff Corey introduced the men. "Slim, I believe you're already acquainted with Bob Underhill. And this here's Bob Overstreet. He's a civil engineer with the Union Pacific Railroad. Bob, this is Slim Sherman, proprietor of Sherman Ranch and contracted relay station operator for Overland."

 **Hands were shaken all around** without Slim getting up. _Union Pacific? What's_ he _doing here?_ As far as Slim understood, the railroad company was the stage line's fiercest competitor and would ultimately prove to be the demise of stagecoach travel.

As if reading Slim's thoughts, Underhill spoke up. "I'm not here to shut you down, Slim... and I know you're wondering why Overstreet's here..."

"Now that you mention it..."

"We're here to look over that rock slide, get an estimate on what's needed to clear it and how long it'll take. UP understands that for the time being coach companies'll still be needed to bring folks in from outlying communities to catch the train. The flood took out the bridge north of town so they're bringing in crews on each side of the river to rebuild it. They figure to have a bigger, stronger and higher one back up in one to two weeks. Overland's contracted with 'em to use their crews to clear the blockage on the stage road."

Sheriff Corey broke in. "I told 'em we'd make a courtesy call on the way since it's your land and they'll need your permission to blast."

"Of course they have my permission."

"The route'll be outta commission for a few weeks, though... that's gonna hit you in the pocketbook some..."

"No... I get paid regardless, if service interruption is due to acts of nature. Why did they need you to escort them? Underhill knows the way well enough."

"Well... there's a couple a other matters... but I been meanin' to come out and check on you people anyway. Sorry about all your troubles... Jess gonna be okay?"

 _ **Jess!**_ **Slim quickly twisted around** to have a look. All he could see were Jess' feet and Young Doc's behind. And Jonesy jiggling the baby cradled in his arms. Kim was nowhere in sight. Aside from a few rips and tears in their clothing and myriad bleeding punctures from rose thorns, the women didn't look too terribly damaged. Lucky and Andy were now pulling Lychee out of the bushes.

Young Doc raised his head, calling for Emmaline, who was complaining about the potatoes... someone had to gather them up and wash them off! Peach was still streaming obscenities, mostly concerning her bloody great cow of an employer and her sincere desire that a thousand fleas infest the armpits and pubic regions of every white person present—better yet, in this entire infernal country!

Young Doc shouted. "EMMALINE! Damn the spuds. I need a nurse... right now, if you please!"

His aunt abruptly segued into _Nurse_ Emma mode and sprang into action, briskly striding around to the steps and kicking potatoes aside as if they were croquet balls.

"Out of the way! Peach... fetch _yisang_ Fred's bag. We'll need some clean towels. Then get some coffee started. Mort... help Slim inside and get him settled... he needs to sit still for a while..."

Nurse Emma took one look at the mess on the far side of the porch, making a _moue_ of disgust and waggling fingers at the two other men. "You two, get some water... better make that two or three buckets."

The two new Bobs didn't hesitate to comply with this overlarge, imperious presence. The first bucket was handed up and Nurse Emma addressed her nephew, still kneeling at Jess' side.

"What's his status?"

"Just stunned, I believe... should be coming around in a few minutes."

"Let's just hurry that along, shall we? Stand aside..."

Young Doc scuttled backwards as Nurse Emma sloshed the entire bucket over Jess' face and shirt front. He came to sputtering and gasping...

"What the...?"

A second bucketload hit him and he yowled. "Yer drownin' me!"

 **It took both doctor and nurse** to lift him up and transfer him to the empty rocker. The first and second floods had effectively washed away most of the effluvia from his clothes and face. A third and fourth drenching removed the rest of it from the floorboards. Leaving Young Doc to attend to Jess, Nurse Emma majestically descended from the porch and signaled to the Bobs to follow her around to the far side where lay the wheelchair and an unmoving man on his back. Before kneeling next to Kim, knee joints cracking, Nurse Emma instructed them to lift the wheelchair back onto the porch. Kim continued looking up at the sky as if this were the most natural place for him to be.

"Are you hurt anywhere?" Her voice was almost tender... almost.

After a long hesitation, Kim answered, his breath coming in short wheezes. "If... I... discover... anything... that... isn't... hurting... you'll... be... the... first... to... know."

"Can you move your legs for us? Okay... that's good. Now let's try your arms..."

All extremities appeared operational and Kim was able to turn his head from side to side.

"Everything seems to be in order. Can you sit up?"

This Kim couldn't do without rolling to his right side. The pain and effort of propping himself into an upright position proved too great and he flopped back down. Nurse Emma sighed, finding she herself needed assistance to get to her feet. The Bobs obliged and then picked Kim up, one of them holding him up with an arm over a shoulder and the other clutching his waistband.

 **Mort hadn't come back outside,** assuming Young Doc and Lucky between them could manage transferring Jess back to the wheelchair, which now had two rocks serving as chocks behind the wheels. The Bobs carefully lowered Kim back into the rocker then helped Lychee back up the steps and into his chair, which had been moved against the wall next to Jonesy. Both of them were thinking the same thing: that they'd been temporarily seconded to the county's lunatic asylum. When the large woman suggested they join the others in the parlor, they obeyed.

Nurse Emma sent Andy inside for a broom to sweep peelings off the porch and told him to start collecting potatoes and take them to the well pump for re-washing. She then thanked the two Bobs for their assistance and suggested they and Mort reconvene in the parlor to finish their discussion with Slim. Jonesy was stupefied. Nurse Emma _never_ thanked anyone for anything.

Pausing on her own way inside to get a dry shirt for Jess, she suddenly realized Jonesy was still holding the infant. _Nurse_ Emma vanished in an eyeblink.

"The poor child has been traumatized so often in the past week, it'll be a wonder if she grows up normal! Better let me take her. Where's her cradle?"

Speechless, Jonesy pointed toward the basket. _Emmaline Whatleigh voluntarily taking charge of a baby? Must be the End Times...!_

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT—PART TWO_

 **BREAKING BAD**

" _ **The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug**_

 _ **which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so**_

 _ **desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world."**_ _(Carl Sagan)_

 **Young Doc wiped** a hand over his face, needing a good stiff drink in the worst way. Lychee'd suffered nothing worse than scratches and punctures from the rose thorns. After getting Jess dried off and reshirted, the doctor was relatively assured that this particular patient hadn't incurred significant injury though he'd added a tender lump to the back of his head.

Young Doc was more worried about Kim—white-lipped and obviously in distress although his breathing had returned to normal. Without doubt whatever healing progress had been made in the past few days had just been undone by the impact with solid ground... which meant they were back to square one, recovery-wise. But Young Doc decided against a more thorough reexamination at the moment, especially as Kim again turned down drugs when offered. Best not show too much concern yet, let him settle for a while.

Jess was complaining of leg pain, convinced he'd rebroken the bone.

"There's no way that could've happened inside the cast. But it might ache for a while on account of being jarred," Young Doc assured him. "If it bothers you that much I'll give you laudanum."

Determined not to show any weakness in front of the others, Jess declined. "Nah... if Kim can do without I reckon I can, too."

"Suit yourself," the doctor shrugged. "Let me know if you change your mind. In the meantime, there's no reason you boys can't get back to peeling potatotes."

Jonesy snorted in derision. He and Lychee'd got right back on the chore as soon as Andy'd brought them the first pail of laundered spuds—just as if nothing'd happened.

Young Doc scooped up his medical bag—he hadn't needed anything out of it after all—and went indoors where Slim was holding court in the parlor with Overstreet, Underhill and the sheriff. Peach was pouring coffee all around.

The two transportation reps had just finished detailing for the rancher what would most likely be involved in bringing workers and equipment in to clear the rockfall by the lake.

"But we won't know exactly until we've had a look around," Bob Underhill said.

"I'd offer you lunch but..." Slim waved toward the house. "I'm afraid the kitchen isn't in operation at the moment... we, uh, had a minor mishap earlier... maybe by the time you get back?"

"Thanks but no," Bob Overstreet said, "I'd like to get back to town before the telegraph office closes up shop. The sooner I can put in a work order to headquarters, the sooner we can get started." He drained his cup and stood up. "In fact, we should be moving along. Mort... you don't need to come along... Underhill knows the terrain. Why don't you hang around and help these folks? We'll collect you on the way back..."

The sheriff agreed. "I've got some other matters to discuss with Slim anyway... you boys go on ahead."

 **After the two had left,** Young Doc commented that Slim'd made a rapid recovery from his coughing spell. The latter flashed those renowned pearly whites and allowed that Peach had fixed him right up with some of her special elixir. The doctor leaned over and took a sniff of Slim's coffee cup. The pungent fumes were enough to make his nose hairs fall out. Now wonder the man was so well oiled!

"Smells like eye of newt and toe of frog," Young Doc said, "not to mention a drop or two of Jonesy's medicinal alcohol."

"Whatever... it sure works! Mort... what're those 'other' matters you wanted to talk about?" Slim grinned happily.

"I can leave if this is private..." Young Doc ventured.

Slim waved a hand. "Oh no... please stay... I'm feeling kind of fuzzy right now. Might not be able to remember whatever he has to say."

Mort fished around in his vest pocket and pulled out some papers, including a crumpled sealed document-sized envelope he handed over to the doctor.

"This one's for you... Lee Wing sent it to the office with a note to give it to you."

Young Doc examined the envelope and set it aside.

"Aren't you gonna open it?" The sheriff asked, openly curious.

"Nah. Probably just information on Chinese medical practices I asked him to look into."

"The other thing," Mort continued, disappointed, "is about that bunch of nuns that was supposed to come in on the stage yesterday afternoon... the head of that group over at Emmaline's is worried about 'em and asked me to check on it. I assume they've turned back to Rock Springs but the telegraph line's down between there and Laramie..."

"The coach is still in the canyon, Mort. The passengers are safe—they slept in the barn last night. The driver and shotgun are here, too."

"Where are they all? Didn't see 'em when we rode up."

"Out rounding up our cattle." Slim let that one twist in the wind. "Should be back by nightfall."

Mort's mouth fell open. "Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack. The Koski brothers, the driver and shotgun, Sally Lowenstein and six nuns... they're all out there chasing cows this morning."

"Well, I'll take your word for it, so long as I can report back they're okay. The river isn't down far enough yet to bring a wagon across."

"I figured that." Earlier Slim'd noticed the three horses were muddied from the flanks down, along with the rider's boots.

"Comin' down slowly, but comin'," Corey said. "Maybe by tomorrow it'll be low enough to get the ladies into town."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah. Here's this week's wanteds... don't imagine there'll be much traffic on the road but you never know." Corey handed over a wad of posters folded in quarters.

Slim flipped through the posters... only five, for the usual miscreants—bank robbery, horse thieving, cattle rustling, stagecoach holdup, murder—all issued by the territorial marshal or sheriffs of neighboring communities.

" **Oh... and this one."** The sheriff unfolded a half-size poster, more of a flyer, and handed it over. "It isn't strictly law enforcement business as far as we're concerned. There's an Oriental gentleman in town... says he's a detective... not Pinkerton. Came into the office this morning and left these..."

The flyer offered a _very_ attractive reward for information leading to the whereabouts or actual corporeal delivery of one Kimball Kahale—alive or dead, with proof of death as a requirement, of course. The poorly executed line drawing bore a crude resemblance to the Shermans' houseguest. The description was ambiguous: light brown skin, eyes and hair; age mid-twenties; average height, weight and build. Distinguishing marks: tattoo and scar on back. The contact was given as a Mister Zhang Wei of the Pan-Pacific Trading Company, LLC, San Francisco Office.

Slim's eyebrows crawled up to his hairline and he whistled at the size of the reward... more than he could hope to earn in a year. He and Young Doc exchanged uneasy glances. Evidently Mort hadn't noticed Kim on the way in, hidden as he'd been below the edge of the porch.

"Sure hope these aren't plastered all over town," Slim said. "Otherwise every amateur bounty hunter in the area'll be..."

"Already thought a that," the sheriff cut him off. "Told him he couldn't put it up on our public bulletin board—that's for official business—or anywhere else in town... too risky."

"What's he wanted for?" Young Doc queried.

"Well now... the man—couldn't hardly understand his accent... this detective feller, he said it was a private matter involving wrongful death..." the sheriff responded nonchalantly, not particularly concerned as on any given day there were dozens of murderers wanted all over the territory. "But that's not the interesting part..."

 **Just as Corey leaned forward,** about to launch into 'the interesting part', Emmaline glided back into the parlor bearing the freshly diapered baby. Going straight to Slim, she exchanged the bundle and a fresh bottle for the sheaf of posters. "Baby wants feeding."

"Why me?" Slim protested.

"This is an equal opportunity household, Matthew. Everyone gets a turn... and everybody else is peeling potatoes."

"Didn't Jess just feed her?"

"Yes... but as she puked it up there's nothing on her stomach and she's hungry again."

Mort looked on curiously. "Hey... that's an Indian kid... where'd you get her from?"

"Abandoned on our doorstep," Slim said, expertly arranging the child in his lap and plugging in the bottle. It'd been thirteen-something years since he'd helped his mother take care of his new baby brother but he recalled the basics as if it'd been yesterday. Emmaline caught the fleeting moment of sorrow to pass over his face and knelt by the chair.

"How is it you know about bottle-feeding?" she asked softly.

"Ma didn't have enough milk for Andy," was the terse reply. "Always blamed herself for him being undersized."

Emmaline patted his shoulder. "That had nothing to do with it, I'm sure. Not all children in a family grow to the same height."

"Don't forget to bring me a towel, Miss Emma."

"Whatcha gonna do with her?" Mort persisted, the business of the wanted flyer already pushed aside in his mind.

"Sally wants to keep her," Young Doc said. "I don't know that's such a good idea but you know Sally... when she puts her mind to it, she usually gets her way."

Emmaline returned with a towel. Folding in half lengthwise, she draped it across Slim's right shoulder.

"Morton, perhaps you would be so kind as to assist Fred in reinstalling the kitchen door. There's a terrible draft coming through there and Peach is having a problem keeping the temperature adjusted in the oven. We'll have to hustle to get lunch together and then we've got to produce dinner for almost two dozen people. Any help you can render will be greatly appreciated..."

"Of course, Missus Giancomo... be glad to..." Corey lumbered to his feet. "Come on, Doc... let's get to it..."

The men exited through the kitchen, the sheriff noting with amusement the uniform coating of flour dust on everything in sight including the two women. "What on earth happened in here this morning?" he asked his companion.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you!"

 **Meanwhile, out on the porch...** Jonesy announced to no one in particular his intention to pay an extended visit to the facility out back. Heaving himself out of the rocking chair, he shuffled off.

"You ain't lookin' too good," Jess commented of Kim. "Shoulda took Doc up on that laudanum."

"No... I can take care of this..." Slim's borrowed jacket had been hung over the back of the rocker. Setting aside his basin and knife, Kim took out his makin's pouch from one of the pockets and carefully unfolded it in his lap... understanding fairly quickly that rolling a quirlie one-handed was going to be next to impossible to accomplish.

"Here... let me do that," Lychee offered. As soon as he unwrapped the oilpaper, his nose twitched and his eyebrows shot up. _"Wahdat, braddah? Dat what I tink it is?"_

 _"Damn straight. Fines kine Maui pakalolo, leeward side da island... jalike?"_

" _Fo' shua!"_

Jess' eyes tracked from one to the other, not a clue as to what was said other than it seemed to involve the odd-looking tobacco. "That ain't Bull Durham, is it?"

"Not by a long shot... want to try some?" Kim said.

"Don't mind if I do..."

So much for the healthy benefits of unpolluted fresh air.

Lychee rolled three fat joints and struck a sulphur kitchen match against a porch post. Peaceable silence prevailed for the first few moments. After a cough or two and a shudder, Jess spoke first. "Forgot how them first coupla draws go to your head when you ain't had a smoke in a while."

"Give it a minute and it'll smooth out..." Kim promised.

"Got a little whang to it... but sweet... say, is this some a that Messican _mota?_ "

Kim shrugged. "My people call it _pakalolo_ or _ganja_. Whatever—it's all good."

"Where'd ya get it? We don't see too many Messicans this far north..."

"Why would you need Mexicans when it grows wild all around here?" Lychee said. "I believe it's called hemp or ditchweed... same stuff rope and linen's made from."

"No kiddin'? So it's like Injun hemp—what they make twine an' nets out of? Heard it were poison but they use it in their medicine, too."

Lychee said, "You're thinking of dogbane... _apocynum cannabinum_. Different family but, yes, poisonous. Indians and white people use both in their folk remedies, though. Like everything else you have to be careful with it and use it in moderation."

"So if ya run outta this stuff ya can just get more from a ditch somewhere—like the rabbit tobacco us kids picked outten the fields back home in Texas?"

"Ah yes... _gnaphalium obtusifolium_ and _pseudognaphalium austrotexanum_ —I've studied those but never tried them," Kim said. "Wouldn't be the same as this—not as powerful, that is. This is a hybridized cultivated strain of _cannabis indica_ blended with _sativa_ , grown especially for medicinal and ceremonial use."

"Uh... you two mind speakin' plain English? I ain't understandin' a word you're sayin'."

"Oh... sorry... forgot."

"Forgot I ain't educated like you and Lychee, you mean?" Jess bristled.

"Very few people around here are," Lychee said. "No need to get your back up."

"I brought this from home for emergency use," Kim grumbled, "...but in all the time I've been in this country I never needed it until I dropped anchor _here_."

 **They lapsed into a prolonged** stretch of wordlessness. Jess was beginning to feel floaty... the promised 'smoothness' rounding off the corners and angles. Conversely, everything he could see was etched in high definition—as if he were wearing magnifying spectacles. Colors were more vivid than he remembered, almost glittering. The thirteen remaining animals in the pasture—nine brown horses in subtle shades of light to dark, three white mules speckled with brown like a chickadee's egg, one donkey the greyish-brown of a very large jackrabbit. The browns, grays and greens of a flock of mallards winging southward in a vee formation. A few puffy clouds like unshorn sheep scudding across a sky paled to heron's egg blue by the late morning sun. Caramel-and-yellow fritillaries flitting from one late-blooming crimson-flowered Indian paintbrush to another. A drift of heart-shaped golden umber-spotted cottonwood leaves fluttering to the ground with every puff of breeze.

Sounds were more vibrant... his own heartbeat in his ears, equine flatulence from the pasture, the clucks of each individual chicken, the rise and fall of voices from inside the house, his own inhalations and exhalations, happy birds tweeting in the trees, the creaking floorboards in the parlor. He fancied he could hear things growing... grass, trees, mountains, hair, toenails...

Life was good. Not great... but, for the first time in a long time, holding promise. It was good to be alive. To be here. With these people who weren't his people but were making him theirs anyway. He was happy to just be sitting on this front porch with a broken leg, on a perfect autumn morning, with his very good friend Lychee and his other very good friend Kim whom he'd shot only two days ago.

Said very good friends was regarding Jess with some solemnity. It was plain to see the herb was working. The other's movements were slow and deliberate, his face relaxed into sort of a goofy grin. Even the restless fingers and eyebrows were verging on idle. Jesse Ewan Harper was stoned as a goat.

 **"His maiden voyage?"** Lychee queried.

"Kinda looks that way," Kim answered.

"You feeling any better?"

"Yep. _Mahalo nui loa!_ Too bad we're about to run out of weed."

"' _A'ole pilikia._ Good thing I brought some with, huh?" Lychee grinned widely.

Kim was only now arriving at a happier plateau. It should have hit him harder and faster, considering he had nothing in his stomach but coffee. The pain was still pretty sharpish, only slightly diminished. He made a mental note to up the percentage of _indica_ in his next batch when he got home... _if_ he ever got there, he mentally corrected himself. _Indica_ was what relieved pain and brought anxiety down to manageable levels. The _sativa_ was doing its job quite nicely, though—bringing his thoughts into sharper focus and relieving the lethargy that'd plagued him since waking up.

" **Do I understand correctly that you're a lawyer?"**

Lychee blew a perfect smoke ring. "I am indeed. Member in good standing of the territorial bar association and house counsel of Wing & Associates though I do a little private practice on the side. 'Course, I don't have much of a practice outside the Chinese community... most whites prefer to stick with their own kind. But just so you'll know, I'm attorney of record for the Whatleighs and the Shermans. Why? Do you need one?"

They both paused and looked at Jess, who was soaring with eagles and not paying the slightest bit of attention to them.

"It's gonna be a while before _he_ comes in for a landing," Lychee commented, snickering.

"I'd like to retain your services... what's the charge?"

"In your case, brah... one dollah! Whatcha need done? We really oughta talk about it in private, though."

"Yeah... but where are we gonna get any privacy around this nuthouse?"

Lychee thought for a few seconds. "You speak any other languages? Like French, maybe?"

Kim smiled beatifically. "Are you kidding? My mother's from Vanuatu... that's where the blonde hair comes from... and her father was a French planter..."

"Splendid! I've just got college French but it's pretty good..."

They continued in that language...

"Before we get into what I need from you, I also need a favor..." Kim said.

"Such as...?"

"I need a priest. Know any?"

"You mean, like a _lama_? There aren't any in Laramie but I could..."

"No... I mean the 'Hail Mary' kind."

"Seriously?" Lychee'd been assuming all along that the other probably leaned toward Buddhism if anything and said so, adding "Wouldn't have figured you for a mackerelsnapper."

Kim shrugged and grinned. "All paths lead to the same mountaintop... never hurts to hedge your bets."

"Whatever... so, what kinda priest you looking for? We've got three in town to choose from... one ultra-conservative, one moderate... and one wild card the other two've been lobbying to get thrown out for years... but his parishioners are passionately devoted to him so the mothership's waffling."

"Sounds like just the man I'm looking for... you know him personally?"

"Fairly well, yes... but if it's spiritual guidance you're after..."

"What I need is dependability, discretion and confessional confidentiality... same reason I need attorney-client privilege."

"I see... well, I'm intrigued... do go on..."

So Kim did, and the more he said the rounder Lychee's eyes got. "You sure want a lot for that dollar, brah... and it'll be stretching ethics a mite thin... but I think all that can be arranged—by the end of next week, maybe."

"I'm not going anywhere soon."

"And we'll have to come up with a plausible reason for bringing the padre out here... the Whatleighs are Presbyterian, I think, and so are the Shermans... or maybe they're Lutheran or Baptist. What do I know? All those white churches look alike to me anyway. What should I tell him?"

"Nothing except that a friend of yours is having a crisis of faith and needs to make a confession. I guarantee that'll get his attention."

"What's his part in this?"

As Kim explained, Lychee nodded his understanding. "Excellent idea and he won't be able to tell anyone about it. You're a sneaky devil, _pengyou!"_

"Do you think he'll be amenable?"

Lychee snickered. "Father Sean? Are you kidding? He'll be on it like stink on... that is, he won't be able to resist. I'll go talk to him soon's I get back to town... if he's sober and not in jail."

"So we have a deal?"

Lychee made a mock bow from the waist up. "Many blessings, Honorable Client. Don't forget to give me that dollar."


	29. Chapter 29

_CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—PART ONE_

 **PLANS AND PROPOSITIONS**

" _ **Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult... Examine your words well, and you will find**_

 _ **that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say**_

 _ **the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings..."**_ _(George Eliot)_

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _It's simply amazing how, in a brief moment of eye contact, two human beings with closely aligned life values can exchange volumes of similar conclusions and arrive at identical accords. When the sheriff had produced that wanted flyer, a torrent of unspoken dialogue had flown between the rancher and the doctor. Why would such a staggering sum be offered simply for an opportunity to question or kill someone over an alleged, unspecified act of a criminal nature? Had the sheriff shown them a poster seeking capture of a fleeing felon convicted of some heinous crime, they might have reacted differently. As it was—for some reason neither could have explained just then—they were in mute agreement that now was not the time to reveal Kim's presence to the outside world.)_

 **Left alone in the parlor,** Slim Sherman contemplated this new dilemma and wrestled with his conscience. Had Mort looked him in the eye and specifically asked _'Have you seen this man?'_ he might have answered truthfully... but Mort hadn't asked. When Fred didn't comment either, Slim knew they shared the same reservations. Mort'd be none too happy when he found out (not _if_... because he would eventually) his two closest friends were holding out on him. On the other hand, it was possible Mort was thinking along the same lines and knew exactly what he was doing by _not_ posing a direct question that would put his friends in the position of having to lie.

Slim tried to put the money issue out of mind but it kept creeping back in. Any man with common sense and looming financial difficulties wouldn't hesitate to let a mere _allegation_ come between his own and his family's well-being and all that money. It wasn't as if he'd never accepted bounty money before... he had, many times... but that had always been in clear-cut cases. This one was too nebulous. What justice would be served by turning the man over? In the meantime, Slim had automatically put the baby up to his toweled shoulder and patted her until she emitted a dainty belch, then placed her back down in his lap.

 **Emmaline wafted back in,** removing the posters from the chair opposite Slim so she could sit in it. She briefly perused the small poster on top.

"Thinking about it?" she began without preamble. "Having a crisis of conscience, are we?"

"I'm not that far gone yet, Miss Emma... but it's an almighty temptation, I'll admit."

"With that kind of money, your worries would be over."

"What bothers me is, have you ever seen a poster that didn't say right out what the person's accused of? Something's not right here, Miss Emma. No... I'm afraid I need a good reason... a real _good_ reason... to turn a man in for blood money."

"Sometimes you're just too damned decent for your own good, Matthew Sherman... but let me say, I'm pleased you've taken this stance. I don't believe our good sheriff's noticed him," she added.

"Kim, you mean? No... I mean yes, he _did_ notice... but he didn't get a real good look at him. I expect he'll _want_ to before he leaves, though..."

Emmaline pursed her lips and smoothed out a wrinkle in her apron. "Well, he just might not be _able_ to..."

"How do you mean? We can't very well hide him now..."

"No... but my patients have had a difficult morning. They require rest in a quiet, isolated atmosphere... preferably undisturbed by visitors. While Wilfred and Morton are busy elsewhere, it would a very good time to put them down for naps in the back bedroom for a few hours."

"A few hours meaning...?"

"Until the sheriff and his friends have departed."

Slim looked down at the drowsing infant in his arms—long black lashes lying against burnished copper cheeks, pert little nose and rosebud mouth—and chuckled.

"You find this amusing?" the woman asked stiffly.

"No... yes... I mean, I just had a vision of Jess' face in a baby bonnet and putting him down for naptime..."

"That would be a sight, wouldn't it?" Her lips curved in a smile.

Slim grinned in return. "And you, Miss Emma... I'm surprised at you... openly aiding and abetting concealment of a wanted man!"

"Sheriff Corey did not state he _personally_ was looking for this person—just that _someone_ was..."

"I'm not comfortable lying to Mort..."

"You didn't lie, Matthew... you simply withheld information. Being in possession of relevant information—or the subject—doesn't necessarily oblige one to deliver it... or him."

"Lying by omission, then. You're splitting hairs, Miss Emma," Slim argued. "That might work for today... but Mort'll be back... you can depend on that... and what if he wants to check for a tattoo...?"

"You leave that to me. I have an idea... though I'll have to send Lucky to the Prairie Rose to get what I need. The next time Morton comes around we shall be prepared..."

"Miss Emma... you are a devious woman!"

"Heed my words, Matthew... _ALL_ women are devious. You'd best remember that! Now give me that baby and go see to our 'boys'."

 **Slim stepped out** the porch door just as Young Doc was going in through the gaping kitchen doorframe. Glancing across the yard, Slim could make out Mort planing down the door in the shadows of the forge shelter. Becoming aware that he was enveloped in a haze of sweet-smelling smoke, he looked around angrily, preparing to take Jess to task... only to discover there was more than one culprit. Squinty-eyed and lolling indolently in their respective chairs, Lychee and Kim both held partially-smoked doobies between thumbs and forefingers. Even Jonesy, glassy-eyed himself, had his seldom-used corncob pipe clenched between his teeth. Jess waved a floppy hand in Slim's general direction, grinning like a mule eating briars and slurring his words.

"Lookee here... ifn it ain't my bes' pard ole Slimp... Slim. Hiya Slim... nice to seeya..."

Slim groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was a conspiracy to make him crazy... and it was working. He recalled where he'd smelled that smell before—in a field hospital in Louisiana where he'd recuperated from a minor wound along with a brace of enemy prisoners waiting to be remanded to a holding facility. Carlos Waldrop and Juan Johnson, halfbreed Mexicans up from the borderlands, had filled the tent with fug from their marijuana pipes. They'd offered to share and he'd declined, but he well remembered the efficacy of their drug of choice... and its odor when burning.

It wouldn't be of any use to yell at the porch squatters. They'd probably just laugh. And where was Andy? He realized he hadn't seen his brother in a while. An inquiry produced scrunched expressions of concentration and shrugged shoulders.

"He's 'round some'eres," Jonesy finally acknowledged in a mumble. "Geddoff t'kid's back whydonsha...?"

"Yeah ya'ole meanie... leavehim 'lone!" was Jess' contribution. "Yer too strickle... strick... too hard on him..."

Slim could feel the steam rising through his shirt collar and bit his tongue hard enough to hurt. At any other time he'd be tempted to haul off and knock Jess' block off... broken leg or no broken leg... but there again, it wouldn't do any good. Neither Jess nor Jonesy would remember any of this when they came to their senses. Slim felt a presence behind him and a big hand on his shoulder...

 **"Leave it be, Matt..."** Young Doc advised quietly as Slim turned to face him.

"Had a word with Emmaline... good idea, that." Young Doc looked at the four seated figures. "In fact, I'd sequester all four of them on medical grounds until they've recovered enough to be coached. I can probably keep Mort occupied for at least an hour. Can you handle this?"

"Yeah, but I'll need Miss Emma's help."

Young Doc called for his aunt, who came at once.

"The reason I came in was to ask if you've got any spare glass panes and glazing pins and putty laying around. Might as well fix that while we're at it..." Young Doc said.

"I think Jonesy's got a box in the storeroom..."

"What storeroom?" the doctor asked.

Slim answered. "The door at the back of the kitchen—next to the one to the root cellar... used to be my parents' bedroom. Roof and walls were damaged in a tornado years ago and I never got around to fixing it up. It's not weather-tight so we use it for storage."

"I'll have a look, then. Thanks." Young Doc turned back indoors.

 **Slim and Emmaline between them** convinced the others it was time to come in for lunch and a nap. They didn't require too much cajoling. Of the four, only Jess was hungry... starving, in fact, or so he claimed. Within ten minutes they had Jonesy and Lychee installed in the front bedroom and Kim in the back bedroom. Jess fell asleep halfway through his sandwich and they manhandled him onto Slim's bed. By the time they'd closed the doors to both bedrooms, Slim himself felt in need of a nap and returned to the chair by the fireplace, where he immediately dozed off. Young Doc returned to the forge carrying the box of window repair materials. Emmaline stepped out onto the porch to collect the bucket full of quartered spuds, noticed the abandoned basins of peelings and walked out into the yard to throw them to the chickens. Andy silently materialized from wherever he'd been hiding.

"And just what have you been up to, young man?" Miss Emma demanded. The boy's clothing reeked of marijuana.

Andy contrived to look innocent. "Nothin'. Just sittin' outside with the guys, list'nin' to 'em talk... 'til I heard Slim comin'..."

"And then?"

"Then I snuck around the corner a the house so's he couldn't see me," Andy confessed. "Knew he'd be mad."

Emmaline sighed. "You didn't partake of any of that... tobacco, did you?"

"Oh no, m'am," the boy replied earnestly, "I don't smoke. Jess gave me one one time and it made me sick."

"Might have known!" Emmaline muttered. "All the same, next time you stay away from them. Just breathing the same air can make you... it's not good for you."

"Yes m'am. I did kinda feel funny for a while but it's goin' away now."

"You'd best stick around where I can keep an eye on you!"

Andy wasn't happy about the prospect of spending the rest of the day trapped under Miss Emma's eagle eye. He knew what was coming...

"In fact, go get your textbooks and do some studying... you haven't cracked a book in a while. You don't want to fall behind at school, do you?"

"Aw, Miss Emma... do I gotta?" he pleaded.

"The correct wording is 'must I?' or 'do I have to?' and the answer is yes. Unless you'd rather peel potatoes..."

"No m'am, I reckon not."

"I suppose you'd like some lunch first..."

"Yes m'am, please."

"Then go tell Young Doc and Sheriff Corey and Luca to come in as well. Remind them to wash up first... that includes you. But first I need to tell you something and ask your cooperation." They went back into the house through the porch door, Andy thoughtfully taking the heavy bucket from her.

 **Andy's eyes widened** as Emmaline showed him the poster and explained why—for the present, anyway—they needed to keep Kim's secret. She didn't mention the suspicion of murder part.

"I want you to understand, Andrew... this might seem wrong to you, and it probably is to some degree, but Kim is our guest... and becoming our friend. We don't know why he's in trouble but we feel we should protect him at least until he's well enough to speak up and defend himself."

"I understand, Miss Emma. It's kinda like when Jess first came here. Folks said he was a dangerous outlaw and oughta be run outta town... and when word got he was livin' here, they got mad with Slim for lettin' him stay."

"Yes... it's sort of like that. It will be easier all around if we can keep his presence here sort of a secret... maybe just not talk about him to anyone? And if anyone does ask you, all you know is that his name is 'Sky Lizard'. Can you do that?"

"Oh yes, m'am!"

"Splendid. Now go get the others. Oh... and Andrew, let's not say anything to Kim about this, either... not until we're absolutely sure it _is_ him."

Andy bounded out the door. Emmaline watched him go with a twinge of regret at not having been a more attentive, involved mother to her own son. She could barely remember what Luca had been like at that age. Slim was a better parent to his young sibling than she'd been to Luca. She sincerely hoped that when Andrew reached adulthood he would appreciate the sacrifices his older brother had made for him.

 **The Sheriff of Laramie** was somewhat bemused to find himself co-opted into rehanging a door, but didn't mind much. It was a restful change from the uproar of the past week in town, which had died down considerably now that they were on the downslope of the epidemic and businesses were slowly returning to normal—those that hadn't been flooded out, that is. And the citizenry in general were being remarkably cooperative about town council-enforced rationing of what goods were still on hand during the quarantine. At an emergency town hall meeting, Union Pacific officials had assured the council that even if rebuilding the bridge took longer than anticipated, there would still be a daily run from Cheyenne as far as the east bank of the Laramie River, where freight would be offloaded onto wagons and brought over via the nearest ford... a minor inconvenience compared to getting no supplies at all.

Sheriff Corey was confident his regular deputy and the short-term coterie of assistant deputies could do without his presence for one day. He and the doctor were able to replace the broken glass in the newly-rehung kitchen door (which now swung open easily) and replace the larger window pane in the parlor that Jess had accidentally shot out. Slim slept through the noise and they had to wake him up when they broke for lunch, which Mort joined after all as Overstreet and Underhill hadn't yet returned.

As they ate Young Doc and Slim regaled Mort with a humorously detailed accounting of the unfortunate series of events that had plagued the Sherman household since the previous Saturday. Their alternating monologues had the sheriff alternately appalled and in stitches, if a little dubious at first. But having witnessed with his own eyes this morning's stellar performance of shenanigans, Mort had to accept the veracity of their tale... no one could possibly have imagined a situation this bizarre.

Slim had started off with an explanation of having found the injured drifter down by the lake.

" **And that would be the stranger** I noticed on the porch earlier?"

 _Oh crap!_ Doctor and rancher avoided looking at each other, each knowing the other had thought they'd got away with the deception.

"Yeah..." Slim said, "Halfbreed name of Sky Lizard or something like that... Métis Makah and white, from Washington Territory, on his way to visit a sister married into a band of Colorado Shoshone, I believe..."

Behind the sheriff's back, Emmaline was scowling at Slim and shaking her head, clearly meaning _don't elaborate!_

"Is that so?" Mort said noncommittally. "I'd like to meet him... and say hello to Jess..."

"Sorry about that, Mort... had to sedate 'em pretty heavily. They really need to rest..." Young Doc said.

"No problem. I'll be back in a day or two to collect your nuns... maybe even tomorrow afternoon if the river's down. I can meet your visitor and see Jess then."

"Sunday would better, yes," Young Doc said blandly.

"Interesting..." the sheriff commented, apropos of nothing. "We rarely see Métis this far south and I've never heard of Makah..."

"It's a northwest coastal tribe," Slim hastily supplied. "Those Métis traders do a lot of business in Seattle, I've heard."

"Uhuh. Well, anything I can bring Jess to cheer him up?"

"I can think of something..." Slim chortled. "Not that he'd be able to... you know..." He gave an apologetic glance to Emmaline, who was giving him the fisheye... this time on account of Andy's presence at the far end of the table. The boy hadn't said a word—not one word—and was being on his very best unobtrusive behavior but listening intently and filing away every tidbit of information. And one thing Emmaline _did_ know about boys was that it was when they were being _too_ quiet that you had to be most on your guard.

 **Midday repast concluded,** Mort followed along behind Young Doc and Lucky as they proceeded from one chore to the next. They wheelbarrowed feed and hay out to the pastured horses and bucket-brigaded water to both inside-corral and outside-corral troughs. Fortunately the pasture had its own water source—the shallow stream that meandered past the house and across the stage road also cut across a corner of the field.

Corey was surprised to note that two more hours had passed by the time Overstreet and Underhill cantered into view from the east. While the sheriff saddled his gelding, the two transportation representatives gave Slim a quick rundown on their recommendations. Some dynamiting would be necessary to break up the blockage, Overstreet said. He felt his explosives experts could direct most of the blasting into the lower basin so as not to impinge on the upper basin's lake. Union Pacific engineers would detrain in Laramie on both sides of the river, along with their equipment, and acquire manual labor and freight wagons locally. They'd have to backtrack east along the stage route, with one group setting up camp on the west side of the slide. The other group would have to convoy overland around the northern edge of the double box canyon and set up their camp near the stage road at the eastern side. Both camps would be self-sustaining and would require no support from the ranch.

"If you have any livestock pastured nearby, you might want to move them out of hearing, though," Overstreet advised.

"I'll see to it," Slim said, not entirely sure where his livestock happened to be at the moment. The fenced winter pasturage he'd mapped out for the Koskis lay mostly to the northeast, hopefully far enough away that the cattle wouldn't be spooked.

Underhill took over. "Before we get started, we have to get that coach out of the canyon. It's a fairly new one, worth over a thousand. Overland wants it salvaged with as little damage as possible."

"There's not enough room to turn it around," Slim pointed out.

"We plan to haul it out backwards with heavy draft horses," Underhill said.

"Where do you expect to find those around here?" Slim snorted. "The only two I know of are Schell's Belgians."

Overstreet smiled. "As it happens, we've got two four-up hitches of Clydesdales in Cheyenne right now, where we've started double-tracking the route. Wait 'til you see 'em! They could pull hell off its hinges! They've got their own special stock car. We'll stop the train at the closest point to the canyon to offload, then lead 'em in from the east."

It occurred to Slim that the whole caboodle—workers, wagons and horses—would necessarily have to cross his property... and transit through fenced areas. He voiced his concern.

Underhill jumped back in. "Not to worry... it'll be another week and we'll give you a heads up... if you're in shape to ride, you can lead the procession yourself... if not, perhaps you could designate someone who knows the terrain and can lead us along the most accessible route for wagons."

"What about fences... you'll have to take some down..."

"And they'll go right back up again. I understand you already have two of our employees on the premises... Kelly and Cooper. We're prepared to lend them to you for as long as you need them... at our expense of course... board and keep and we'll continue to pay their salaries. If they're agreeable to the idea, that is. How does that sound?"

Slim said that seemed fair enough, as long as fences would be immediately restored and no pastured cattle compromised. Underhill assured him that would be the case.

With that, Sheriff Corey mounted his horse and the three men prepared to return to Laramie. Before they could move off, Emmaline exited the house with a laden flour sack and two canteens which she handed up to Mort.

"Sandwiches for the other gentlemen to eat on the way... I'm sure they must be quite hungry by now. Hot coffee in the canteens."

The three thanked her and headed down the road.

" **That went well,"** Emmaline commented as Young Doc and Luca sauntered back to whatever they'd been doing.

"I hope so," Slim replied. "But I get the impression Mort wasn't too convinced. That quip about wanting to meet our stranger. Why would he want to? Normally he'd have no interest in drifters, halfbreed or otherwise, unless he smelled trouble."

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I'm going to ask Fred to stay over so Luca can use his horse to go into town this evening. We're out of a few things and he can go by the Rose in the morning. Right now, Mister Sherman, I want you to come back inside and rest."

"Aw... Miss Emma!" Slim did his best imitation of Andy, grinning.

"Come along, Matthew. There's a pile of potatoes that didn't get peeled today..."

The grin faded. "You gotta be kidding!" _Peeling spuds is restful?_

"Yes... I'm kidding. I've set Andrew to his books. You need to sit there with him and help."

 **The rest of the afternoon** evolved quietly. Young Doc and Lucky measured and sawed lengths of lumber leftover from the bathhouse construction and repaired the porch railing, adding a new rail to the east side of the porch where there hadn't been one before. They chopped wood and prepared the two wash boilers for use later that evening, after Emmaline pointed out that when the roundup crew got back a whole bunch of folks would be needing to use the bathhouse.

On the stove Peach had two of Jonesy's large soup pots bubbling with hearty potato, corn and onion chowder—one with cheese and the other with chunks of sausage. In spite of the morning's catastrophe, she'd managed to turn out loaf after loaf of crusty sourdough bread and two pans of oatmeal, molasses and raisin cookies. Every time Emmaline's back was turned, Peach would slip cookies to Andy and Slim at the parlor table, where geography study was underway.

The boy was reveling in the fact that for once his brother had nothing more pressing to attend to and was able to give him his undivided attention. Lychee emerged from the bedroom at one point and sat down with them. Even better! He'd actually been to many of these far-off lands and contributed interesting anecdotes that made studying so much more interesting. Andy was positively ecstatic! Now, if only Jess would wake up! Then he'd have all his favorite people around him. Well... except Kim... and he really didn't know Lychee all that well... probably not well enough to be calling him by his Christian name much less his nickname, except Lychee'd told him to. But after today he was getting to like him an awful lot and hoped he didn't mind being counted as the friend of a kid. Andy wasn't entirely sure why Lucky—someone else he didn't know well—seemed to be avoiding Jess... and no one would explain to him what that fight in the bathhouse had been about. Why did grownups have to be so complicated and secretive all the time?

Jonesy was next up, bypassing the study group in favor of hanging around the kitchen stove and annoying Peach with unsolicited cooking tips. She put him to work stirring both soup pots—concoctions that thick had to be stirred constantly or they'd scorch. That freed her up to do other things, such as roll out won ton wrappers and finely dice vegetables and precooked pork for the spring rolls she had in mind making as a surprise. That didn't stop them from nonstop bickering.

Little Lily was good as gold, sleeping most of the day, waking up occasionally to be changed and fed. Emmaline whirled like a dervish—bring the chairs in from the porch! Clear the dining table! Clear the kitchen table! Push the two together to form a banquet table! Set the table! Find two clean white sheets to serve as tablecloths! Everyone start washing up NOW! Put on clean shirts, for heaven's sake!

Somehow in the middle of all this the lady had managed to tidy herself in a fresh dress and apron and put her hair back up neatly, then insisting Peach do the same.

"Since when do we go to all this trouble for supper?" Jonesy wanted to know, peeved.

"Since the Sisters of the Divine Illumination will be dining with us!" Emmaline barked back.

 **Nuns! NUNS!** Activity ground to a halt. They'd forgotten about the nuns! Yikes! Suddenly they milled about in a frenzy as Emmaline dispensed a fresh set of marching orders. Go wake Jess up, help him do whatever he needs to do, get him presentable and in his wheelchair! Make sure Kim combs that rat's nest of hair—he looks like the north end of a southbound yak!

Slim was dispatched to roust Jess and Kim. Jonesy and Andy dashed to the front bedroom as all their clothes were in there. Lychee elected to limp out to the outhouse on crutches and beat the crowd, calling out to Young Doc and Lucky on the way.

The pair had come full circle, chore-wise. It was time to feed and water again. Milk the cow again. Lure the chickens back into their coop for the night with handfuls of grain. Bring in more water for the kitchen barrel. Bring in more wood for the stove and fireplace. Both doctor and artist were dog-tired and aching in unaccustomed places. Collecting clean clothes, they ducked into the bathhouse for a speedy all-over wash. Good thing they'd started heating the wash boilers an hour ago and there was plenty of hot water.

Lucky wasn't pleased to be told he needed to eat right away and hit the road. His mama wanted him back by noon the next day, latest... after fulfilling her requests. Same arrangements as before with regard to the river crossing. Young Doc went to saddle his horse while Lucky downed two big bowls of soup, one of each variety, and demolished almost an entire loaf of bread. The doctor had additional notes for him to deliver. So did Lychee.

"Do I look like a pony express rider?" Lucky grumbled, stuffing cookies into his jacket pockets.

"Don't you run that animal to death," Young Doc warned. "Let him set his own pace. He knows the way home..."

"Yes, Fred," Lucky sighed, rolling his eyes.

Luckless Lucky was no sooner out of sight than the range riders finally returned.

They could be heard a long time before they could be seen. They were singing. Loudly. And off key. Also laughing. Very loudly. The sun was just touching the peaks of the far-off mountains.

 _CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—PART TWO_

 **SADDLE MATES AND DINNER DATES**

" _ **An outfit that gets along and works well together makes the Boss smile."**_ _(Campfire Cowboy Ministries)_

 **Twelve done-in horses** shuffled into the yard and came to a halt, heads drooping, coats powdered with dried lather and riders' clothing rimed with dried sweat. Emmaline, Slim and Young Doc strode out to meet them as one by one they slid from their saddles to lean tremble-legged against their mounts.

Slim went up to Sally, resisted giving her a bear hug in front of all these people. "We were beginning to worry..."

"No you weren't," she retorted, teeth gleaming whitely from a dirt-crusted face. "If you were you would've come looking for us."

"Didn't expect you to be gone all day," he scolded. "Everyone all right?"

"Of course we're all right. What you really ought to be asking is, how many cattle did we bring in..."

"Okay... I'll bite... how many?"

"All of 'em... and then some," Sally crowed triumphantly. "Five hundred seventy-three head at last tally, plus or minus a few."

Slim was stunned. "But... that's not possible... I don't even _have_ five hundred head on the books... there might've been maybe three-hundred and fifty or four hundred at the most... are you sure you checked brands carefully?"

She stood back and put her hands on her hips. "You think I'm some kinda fool, Matthew Sherman? You think we just ran in every bovine we came across _without checking the brand?_ "

"Well... no... but..."

Sally waved toward the clutch of six nuns, who appeared to be facing off with the five male cowpokes. "Let me tell you something about these cowgirls... they knew exactly where to look... they didn't leave a boulder unturned or a bush unlooked behind. They flushed cows out of crevices too small for a cockroach to hide in. They were like sheepdogs on horseback... relentless!"

"I still don't understand..."

"Can we discuss this later? We're all starving and filthy and we've still got horses to put up..."

 **By this time a minor altercation** between the men versus the Sisters of the Divine Illumination had escalated to a shouting match. At issue was who, exactly, were going to attend to the horses.

The Reverend Mother was bellowing. "Let go those reins, Mister Cooper, before I wallop you a good one!"

"Now see here, Sister... it ain't fitten..." PlumbBob was pleading.

"It's Reverend Mother, if you please, and I'll put up my own mount thank you very much. Every man tends to his own animal before tending to himself! It's like a law or something... an unwritten code!"

"But y'all ain't men, Sis... Reverend Mother... y'all are ladies!"

" _WE ARE NOT LADIES! WE ARE NUNS!"_

Beyond her, Sister Bertha was vigorously fending off BobCat Kelly's advances by slapping at him with the loose ends of her reins. The three Koskis were standing by, waiting to see who would prevail. So were the other four nuns... but the looks on their faces indicated they were ready and willing to roll up their sleeves—to fight for their constitutional rights and privileges as equal citizens to unsaddle and rub down their own horses.

Emmaline wanted to laugh so badly she was afraid she might wet herself. But she sucked it up and waded in to defuse the situation.

"Moira... Moira... please, would you listen to reason? Just once—just this once—could you get off your moral high horse and let the men have their way? It would please them greatly to render this one little service for ladies of the cloth... and if you stand here arguing all evening, dinner will be ruined and my cook will go on a rampage. Please, Moira... do it for me. Do you realize how hard it is to find a decent cook and housekeeper out here? I implore you!" Emmaline ran out of breath about the time as the Reverend Mother ran out of steam.

With one last glare at PlumbBob Cooper, the Reverend Mother capitulated. "Oh, very well... but we need to scrape off a few layers of dirt before we can enter the house..."

"The bathhouse is ready and waiting for you. You do have a change of clothes, one presumes?"

 **Earlier Emmaline** had chivvied her nephew and son into topping off the bathhouse tubs while she carried out several loads of towels and replacement bath products. Four oil lamps lit the interior of the bathhouse in a golden glow. Now she and Sally stood by in the barn as the Reverend Mother and her flock rummaged through their luggage for dinner attire, not that they had that much from which to choose. The trio spoke quietly so as not to be overheard by the five younger women.

There were twenty head of people to feed, Emmaline explained to her friend, and ten could be seated at one time. There would have to be two seatings... she and her nephew Fred—Young Doc—would serve at the first one...

With a wicked gleam in her eye, the Reverend Mother opined that the first seating should consist of her five charges—Bertha, Harriet, Phoebe, Florence and Lucy—and five men: Slim, Jess, Lychee, Andy and the mystery man who'd not yet been introduced. Emmaline raised an eyebrow.

"I should think you'd prefer them to be in the company of... er... older… uh… less attractive… gentlemen?" she whispered.

The Reverend Mother easily read between the lines. "Come now, Em... don't you think the young ladies deserve a little eye candy every now and then. They have precious few opportunities to enjoy the company of attractive young men, you know."

"Moira!" Emmaline exclaimed, scandalized. "They're _nuns..._ and you're deliberately strewing their paths with temptation?"

The other shrugged. "We're practical women, you and I, are we not? I freely admit that I'm far more liberal than the ideal Mother Superior should be, according to doctrine and accepted practice. For instance, I firmly believe that _shielding_ these woman—or any young person—from temptation serves no useful purpose. From cradle to grave, every single one of us will be faced with temptation in one form or another. Instilling fear of censure or punishment is one way of deterring people from yielding to it—education, learning to think for yourself, is much better. In short, while I have no doubts as to my girls' beliefs that they were called to serve our Lord, I'm well aware that they're yet young—with normal female yearnings. If they are to discover that this calling is transient or unsustainable, that they're unable to keep to their vows of celibacy, better it should happen now while they're still of a marketable age rather than later when they're past their shelf life. You see what I'm saying?"

Emmaline and Sally nodded in understanding. The male-dominated hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church wouldn't... but then, they weren't blessed with the superiority of female logic.

 **Emmaline choreographed her dinner plans** along the same lines as Sunday dinners at the Prairie Rose, when the establishment was closed and the house cook had the day off. While half the staff ate, the other half minded the vittles, served or cleaned up... then they switched places.

Shortly before everyone was summoned to table, she identified a glitch in her plan... and that was the absence of Kim.

"Where is he?" she demanded of Slim.

"Refused to get up. What do you expect me to do... drag him out by his heels?"

"If that's what it takes..." the woman stormed.

"I'll go talk to him," Jess offered, expertly wheeling around the chair and squeezing back through the still open bedroom door. Five minutes later he returned with Kim in tow... disgruntled-looking but neatened up some and reasonably presentable. Slim made a note to ask him later what he'd said. Jess had an enviable track record when it came to coaxing women into doing things they didn't think they wanted to do. Not so much with men.

Emmaline hadn't gone so far as to assign seats but assumed all the females would be sitting on one side and the men on the other. Somehow they sorted themselves out so that they were equally interspersed— resulting in Jess occupying the foot of the table with Florence to his right and Lucy to his left. (Trust him to score the two youngest and prettiest!) At the head of the table, Bertha had Lychee to her right and Slim to her left. In the middle, Andy and Harriet faced Kim and Phoebe.

Peach had been dismissed from duty and sent, along with the baby, to join Sally and the Mother Superior in the bathhouse. Jonesy was co-opted to keep the soup pots stirred and mind the oven (with the admonishment to not lift anything heavy!). Young Doc cheerfully pitched in as waiter. Circumnavigating the table—replenishing as needed the soup tureens, butter bowls, bread plates and water glasses—Emmaline soon found she could relax her vigilance.

The Reverend Mother had given permission for her charges to appear in _mufti_ —in this case meaning ordinary day dress rather than religious garb, seeing as how they possessed only one habit apiece and those would require laundering in the morning. They were identically attired in plain, unornamented brown cotton frocks with pristine white collars and cuffs. On their heads they wore white kerchiefs. Emmaline thought they looked like a quintet of Quaker housewives.

 **As expected, Matthew and Lindsay** exhibited faultless table manners, conversing in modulated tones with just the right balance of charm and respect. Andrew was proving his ability to act quite the young gentleman Emmaline knew he could be, thanks to Mary Grace Sherman's firm belief in _early_ childhood training and Matthew Sherman's dedication to keeping that youngster on the straight and narrow!

Jess Harper, whom Emmaline'd reckoned (justly so) would be least refined, had abandoned his usual spear-and-shovel eating technique and was carefully emulating his dinner companions' mastery of forks, knives and spoons. _Bless his heart!_ She had to admit she was somewhat surprised at how easily and naturally he was able to join in the conversational flow, despite his educational and grammatical handicaps. And, of course, _any_ female would have to be stone dead to _not_ respond to that expressive face, that infectious grin, those marvelous blue eyes...

 _Stop that, Em! Attend to business and act your age!_ With a suppressed sigh, Emmaline wrenched her thoughts away from Jess, training her sights on the one reluctant diner. Either extraordinarily shy or just determined to play wet blanket, Kim was toying with his food and speaking very little. He could at the very least be making an _effort_ to look interested, she thought with great annoyance.

As dinner progressed, many surprises were in store for the participants...

 **Conversation started off sedately enough,** with Sister Bertha breaking the ice with erudite inquiries to Slim about the ranch... its history, current acreage, expansion plans, and so forth. A graduate of the coeducational Iowa State College of Agriculture and adept at gauging how many acres of any given section of land were needed support the type of livestock pastured on it, Bertha's estimate of how much more acreage the Sherman ranch required—based on the current head count—was shockingly higher than what Slim had been calculating.

Harriet, the former accountant who'd acted as tallykeeper, produced a detailed list of cattle recovered—so many cows with spring calves at heel, so many heifers and steers in the twelve- to eighteen-month range (next year's marketable stock) and an insignificant number of cows that were either barren or had lost their calves.

What accounted for the discrepancy in Slim's inventory was a fair number of mavericks of both genders that had somehow been overlooked in previous roundups, Furthermore, the nun informed the rancher, they'd turned up approximately three dozen cows with out-of-season calves born since the spring roundup. Mister Feets had sequestered these along with the mavericks in a separate pasture from the main herd as, in his opinion, a branding and castrating party would be advisable in the very near future... but not for Mister Slim to worry... he and his brothers and the Bobs would be attending to that in the coming week or so. Lychee the lawyer concurred. The sooner those slicks were officially marked as Sherman property, the better.

 **Andy and Lucy found common ground** when he mentioned he would be continuing his education in St. Louis. She had attended the female seminary associated with that very same school! Yes... he would be homesick at first—all the first-years were, but there was so much to see and do there... and all sorts of interesting people to meet! Yes... the curriculum was demanding, but he'd soon find his routine and there'd be plenty of extracurricular activities to keep him entertained.

Jess was delighted to discover a fellow Texan in Sister Florence, although they might well have been from different countries—he was from the cotton-growing panhandle plains region and she was born and raised near Beaumont on the marshy river estuaries marking the state line with Louisiana. They soon joyously arrived at the agreement that fishing was the ultimate pleasure in life and launched into serious debate over stream versus lake, artificial lures versus live bait, trout versus bass. Jess couldn't give an opinion on bank versus boat, finally admitting he'd only recently learned to swim and was nervous about leaving _terra firma_.

 **A graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary** with a degree in library science, Sister Phoebe was disappointed at finding herself paired with the man who'd been rather ambiguously introduced as a multi-ethnic visitor of native descent from Washington Territory. As he'd barely acknowledged her at first, she glumly anticipated an evening of exchanges employing grunts and handsigns. Instead, she was simply flummoxed when she stupidly inquired if he'd read any good books lately and he finally unbent, responding in the affirmative. Turned out 'Sky Lizard' not only was capable of speaking whole sentences but shared her love of literature. She could hardly believe her luck! They commenced comparing favorite authors and genres.

In the meantime, the farrier/artisan metalworker, the cook/housekeeper and the Mother Superior lingered in the bathhouse as long as they dared, knowing the Bobs and the Koskis were next in line as soon as they were done dealing with horses.

 **Too soon first seating** was over and it was time for shift change. The younger women, having enjoyed an unexpectedly entertaining evening with 'civilians', were about to keel over with exhaustion. Collected by their leader, they were shepherded back to the barn where Peach was already snoring with an arm protectively over the baby's basket. The mobility-impaired—Jess and Lychee—elected to return to the front porch, suitably jacketed against the chill. Andy was detailed to man the soup pots and oven, Kim to wash, and Slim to serve. At first Young Doc thought to object to Kim being pressed into service, then opted to just keep a close eye on him to judge how well he was holding up.

The Reverend Mother presided at the head of the table with Young Doc to her right and Jonesy to her left. At the foot, Emmaline had Robert 'PlumbBob' Cooper to her right and Feets to her left. Roop and Oxtoe faced Robert 'BobCat' Kelly and Sally, respectively, across the middle of the table—with only three females not quite as equitable a distribution, but in any case the main topic was the roundup itself from a mostly male perspective.

The Koskis were absolutely in awe of their female co-riders and the Bobs couldn't heap enough praise on their expertise...

"Ain't never seen nothin' like it in all my born days!" PlumbBob remarked to Emmaline. "Them gals was movin' critters along like no tomorrer. Me and BobCat had to hustle to keep up!"

An eyebrow shot up. "Are you implying women in general are incapable of handling cattle, Mister Cooper?"

"Oh no, m'am, Miz Emmaline... not at all!" the cowboy replied, eyebrows knotted together over blue eyes so eerily like Jess Harper's. "Ah'm the only boy in the litter at home. Our Paw passed over when we was young 'uns back home in West Virginny, afore Maw moved us all out ta California. Mah sisters growed up havin' to do all the things boys in a fambly'd be 'spected to do. We got us a little spread over in the San Joaquin Valley in California... jus' a section but 'nough to run cattle on. Thing is, them girls be fightin' 'mongst themselves all the livelong day an' they don't know teamwork from tiddlywinks. Maw allus said they was gonna be the death of her... Miz MamaSuper over there, she got her gals all trained up so's they work together an. don't waste no time!"

At the other end of the table, the Reverend Mother's face reflected a revolving gamut of emotions from pride in her charges, consternation at being referred to as 'Miz MamaSuper' and amusement at the young man's earnest attempt to give credit where it was due without displaying any gender bias.

"You and your wife and children live on the family ranch, then... with your mother and sisters?" Emmaline inquired delicately, having noticed both men sported wedding rings.

"The older gals married an' moved off. Now it's just Maw, me an' my wife JoAnne, mah baby sister Libby an' her new husband Emmett. Me an' Jo have a little girl, Melissa—she's two."

 **Emmaline directed her attention to BobCat.** "What about you, Mister Kelly? Are you also a California rancher, formerly from... ah... West Virginia?"

The older Bob grinned. "Far from it, Miss Emma. I'm from Vermont. I can ride and drive well enough—and distinguish the front end of a cow from the back—but that's about it. I teach high school mathematics and science. My parents were missionary educators and Kathryn, my wife, taught English before we married… still does occasionally, whenever a substitute's needed. We have a little eighty-acre farm next to my brother Jim's in Buenaventura... mostly orchards and some riding horses. Jim's got a thriving business supplying vegetables to urban markets from his own land and mine... my cut of the profits is enough to keep us afloat. Couldn't support it otherwise on just a teacher's salary!"

"And do you have children?"

"Two boys and a girl... Joseph's sixteen. We're hoping to enroll him in that new University of California in Berkeley when he graduates high school. Juliet's sixteen and Paul's fourteen. They're great kids... we'd hoped for others, but..." BobCat shrugged and made a 'what-can-you-do?' gesture.

Emmaline steepled her fingers. "If you don't mind my asking, how are the two of you related... and how did you come to be driving stagecoaches so far away from home instead of tending to your usual business?"

PlumbBob's mouth was full so he nodded at BobCat to pick up that thread.

 **BobCat put down his spoon.** "It's sort of a long story involving a legacy and a potload of money. PlumbBob and I are heirs, in a roundabout way… and Jess probably will be, too, once we've nailed down his kinship to us..."

That got everyone's attention. Utensils paused in mid-air and jaws stopped mid-chew.

Slim stood rooted to the spot with a platter of sliced bread in his hands. "Should I bring him in to hear this?" he asked tentatively.

BobCat considered this. "No... not yet. I wouldn't want to get his hopes up if we can't prove a connection..."

"Pray do continue!" Emmaline appealed.

"Can he, uh... can they hear us out there on the porch?" BobCat inquired.

Emmaline assured him that the conversation wouldn't be clearly audible if he kept his voice down.

"PlumbBob and I are second cousins—our grandmothers are sisters from a family of twelve girls... nine still living. Their family was among the first Oregon settlers, later moving to Washington State. Our maternal greatgrandmother's the widow of a lumber baron up in Seattle and she's a right old bi... besom. No one likes her. She squats up there in this creepy Gothic horror of a mansion, counting her gold pieces and devising ways to devil her descendants..."

"Stagecoach?" Emmaline prompted, a trifle impatiently. They didn't have all night!

"Right... well... back in the spring the old lady fell ill and everyone thought she was about to cash in her chips... to be honest, we all _hoped_ she would..."

"How old is _old?_ " the Reverend Mother wanted to know.

"Ninety-something... not what you'd call an attractive mature lady of a certain age... like you and Miss Emma!" BobCat winked, managing to elicit blushes from both mature women of a certain age. Most certainly this young man shared kinship with that shameless snakecharmer, Jess Harper, Emmaline was thinking.

"So anyway, she decided all her surviving female descendants needed to come see her before she kicked the bucket... and the deal was they had to all be there at the same time."

"What about husbands and male offspring?" Emmaline asked.

BobCat shook his head. "Not invited. However, wives were included _if_ they had daughters. This wasn't so much an invitation as a royal summons, a command performance."

"One hopes these journeys were underwritten by the matriarch," the Reverend Mother sniffed. "What gall! To point a finger and expect everyone else to jump!"

"Oh… they are. Her lawyers're handling the whole thing. Basically, no-shows'll be culled from the herd, inheritance-wise."

"So what happened?" Emmaline was intrigued. "Surely some of you stood on principle and refused?"

"Heck no!" BobCat grinned. "Cora's a man-hater and a loony, but she's worth millions—which all the females stand to inherit _if_ they dance to her tune. Even divvied up a hundred ways that's more cash than any of us'll see in a lifetime. Speaking for myself, I consider myself a man of principle, yes... but I also have a mortgage and three children to educate. Kathy agreed. So... right now my grandmother, my mother, my wife and my daughter are in Seattle, along with PlumbBob's ladies. They been up there since July and haven't been dismissed yet..."

"That's unconscionable!" the Reverend Mother exclaimed.

"I still don't see what this has to do with Jess," Slim complained. "His mother died in a house fire. The one sister who survived is also deceased, as far he knows. How would he benefit from any inheritance... if it turns out he's related, that is...?"

Slim'd resumed circulating around the table but was pondering BobCat's statement about principles... and trying unsuccessfully _not_ to think about the reward on offer for throwing Kim to the lions... or whoever was after him. He, too, had morals, scruples, ethics and _principles_. How far was he willing to bend them if it meant paying off the current mortgage, ensuring Andy's education all the way through college, being able to acquire prime breeding stock to build up his herd? Principles talked... but money walked. He almost missed BobCat's response to his own question.

"The lawyers suggested—and the old harridan finally agreed—that if in any one of the twelve lines of daughters there are no surviving females, then their share of the legacy devolves to male descendants. PlumbBob's mother and mine have been working on our family tree for years... soon's they get back, we'll put 'em on Jess' case. They're nitpickers... if there's a connection, they'll find it. But I wouldn't tell him about this just yet... it could take months or years for Cora to get around to dying and relieving the world of her cantankerous presence... she's mean that way."

"You hear that, Andy... Kim?" Slim called back to the kitchen, knowing his brother's batlike ears had been following everything.

"Yessir... I hear you. Ain't sayin' a word!" Andy answered. Kim merely nodded.

Slim wasn't up to correcting him.

"STAGECOACH!" Emmaline suddenly barked.

Everyone flinched.

"Oh... right... well... PlumbBob and I decided we could use a little break from routine ourselves and neither of us had ever been out here in the mountain states, so we signed on as relief drivers with Overland. Seemed like a good idea at the time... see the interior of our country and get paid to do it!"

Ever-practical Emmaline wanted to know who was minding Bob Cooper's ranch and who was taking care of Bob Kelly's farm and sons.

PlumbBob finally spoke for himself. He'd been steadily chowing down and was about to founder. "My brother-in-law's got it covered. He's a good man and I trust him."

BobCat assured Emmaline that his brother Jimmy was watching over his boys along with his own two while their wives and daughters were away.

 **The hour was growing late.** The Koskis excused themselves, exclaiming that this was the most fun they'd had since the freight wagon containing a load of baby pigs had overturned at the corner of Fourth and Main, and a hundred panicked piglets had scampered in all directions... including up onto the boardwalk and under old lady Jamison's voluminous petticoats! They wished there were more cows to chase tomorrow!

Emmaline dispatched Young Doc to retrieve the men from the porch and trundle Jess to the back bedroom. Andy, Kim and Jonesy were instructed to attend to whatever they needed to out back and then go to bed as well. Sally and the Reverend Mother took over dishwashing detail as the Bobs bussed the table and started a drying line. With Emmaline putting items away, in no time at all the kitchen was restored to an orderly state to await Peach's attention first thing in the morning. Sally, Emmaline and the Reverend Mother drifted off to the barn, leaving Slim, Young Doc and Lychee to close up.

Sleeping arrangements were the same as the night before, with the exception of Young Doc's taking the place of the absent Lucky in the front bedroom. It had been an eventful day. By the time the last oil lamp flickered out, none of the denizens had any trouble falling into deep and dreamless sleep.


	30. Chapter 30

_CHAPTER THIRTY—PART ONE_

 **A VERY BUSY DAY**

" _ **Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment**_

 _ **and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest**_

 _ **purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing."**_ _(Thomas A. Edison)_

 **Friday, October 7…** As dawn lightened the sky to pearl grey, Peach presided over the stove while Emmaline ferried dishes and silverware to the table and set out condiments and accompaniments for pancakes, scrambled eggs, toast, bacon and sausage. Both coffeepots were bubbling away and pans of buttermilk biscuits were ready to pop into the oven. On the counter, bowls waited in readiness for the eggs Andy was already out gathering, and pitchers for the fresh milk Sally would be bringing in presently. Young Doc had a fine blaze going in the fireplace, having replenished both woodboxes and the water barrel in the kitchen, and was contentedly warming his backside there.

The Bobs and Koskis were already at the morning feeds, barrowing hay out to the pasture and buckets of grain to the dry troughs. The six nuns, layered against the pre-sunup chill in a variety of sweaters and shawls, had both washboilers in operation and the first of their habits and dainties on the line. Eyeing the small mountain of 'family' laundry that had accumulated on the side porch, the Reverend Mother informed Emmaline that they would be attending to that as well.

Lychee had reluctantly rolled out and hobbled to the back bedroom where group shaving operations were underway. Slim had already finished his own and offered to do Jess, but the latter insisted he could take care of himself if someone held the mirror for him. The fingers of his bunged-up right hand were still stiff and clumsy—every other stroke produced a nick. Slim had to stifle his mirth as he pinched off hunks of Gayetty's tissue and applied them to his partner's bleeding face. Made him think of that Oriental torture—death by a thousand cuts. Dang if that fool Texan wasn't one hard-headed son-of-a-gun!

Always-hungry Jess was raring to head for the breakfast table until his partner convinced him he might want to wait until the bleeding had stopped. Did he really want to appear in front of all those women with jaws and chin adorned with little fungus-like wads of tissue? Well, no...

Slim exited the men's beauty salon as Lychee and Kim took turns at the mirror, attending to their own ablutions and ignoring Jess' catty remarks about their paucity of facial hair. The half-Scotsman had not inherited his father's hirsuteness while Kim, who hadn't shaved in a week, sported a barely visible dusting of dandelion down.

 **A noisy and convivial breakfast** was served buffet-style—with everyone straggling in at intervals, in no particular order, to fill their plates and hunt for whatever unoccupied horizontal surfaces was available. In the melee, no one noticed Kim snagging his jacket from the rack and slipping out the door.

Peach kept on cooking while Emmaline shuttled food out to the table and Sally washed dishes between recharging Lily's pacifier with sugar lumps. The basket had been parked on top of the piano where the baby was entranced by the antics of the finches in the wall-hung cage above. When it came time for a bottle and Kim was nowhere to be seen, she'd been handed over to Jess at his request. With his wheelchair positioned in the corner near the doors to the root cellar and store room, he was able to carry on a conversation with Sally as she worked.

As the rising sun illuminated the landscape, Young Doc, Slim and Lychee repaired to the front porch to enjoy their après-breakfast coffees and indulge, away from disapproving female eyes, in some of Fred's fine Cuban cigars. Suddenly the doctor remembered the envelope from Lee Wing that Sheriff Corey had delivered the previous day. Stepping inside to fetch it, he extracted the contents—another wanted poster—full-size this time, and of better quality—along with two sheets of foolscap covered, _hanzi_ -style, with orderly columns of Chinese glyphs. Although Young Doc knew a fair amount of spoken Chinese, written Chinese looked to him like so many chicken scratchings. These he handed over to Lychee to translate.

All three examined the poster with consternation at the much more—and accurately—detailed information: subject five foot six, one hundred thirty-five pounds, light brown complexion, light hazel eyes, dark blonde hair. A much clearer likeness engraved from an albumen print. A second image: a line drawing of the dragon tattoo including the scar that bisected it. Possible aliases: Kimball Camerata and Chen Sonchai Kim. A reward substantially greater than that offered on the first poster, with an additional advisement in boldface type that payment of said reward was absolutely contingent on the subject's being returned alive and unharmed. Again, there was no explanation of _why_ the subject was wanted. Respondents were directed to contact the nearest office of Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. There could be no doubt this was _their_ Kim.

Lychee finished skimming the two sheets and glanced around to make sure Kim or anyone else wasn't within earshot. "Mr. Wing has had news from San Francisco," he said quietly.

" **Already?"** Young Doc said.

"Ah... the wonders of modern transportation and cable communications!" Lychee smirked. "And of course, Lee's network of spies... but don't worry... Poot used one of the house codes when sending the telegram..."

"What codes? Who's Poot? What's this about?" Slim demanded. "And what's Wing got to do with it?"

"Earlier this week I asked Lee to sniff around," Young Doc admitted, "See what he could find out about Kim—who he is, where he's from... showed him some things to help point him in the right direction," Young Doc admitted.

"What things?"

"Just... things. Things of Kim's that would help establish his identity, as he hasn't been forthcoming..."

"You went through his personal gear?" Slim hissed with indignance. "I can't believe you'd be that rude, Fred!"

"I had suspicions he wasn't quite what he seemed... and that was _before_ Mort and his flyer..." Young Doc cut him off firmly.

"If you already knew Kim was a criminal, why didn't you say so earlier?" The rancher was visibly upset.

"It was only a suspicion... and you were too sick to deal with it last week!"

"I'm not too sick now!"

"That's why we're talking about it _now_ , Slim. Furthermore, these flyers make no allusion to criminal activity. Pretty important omission, don't you think? Before you blow a valve, let's hear what's in this note... Lychee, would you read it to us, please?"

Lychee began a halting translation, there being no way to provide a literal one. As he went along he had to pause between phrases to convert the text to English format in a recognizable flow.

 **Andy sat at the corner of the table** closest to Jess' wheelchair, watching him handle that little baby as if he knew what he was doing, trying to reconcile this domestic image with the Jess Harper he knew and admired. Intuiting the boy was down in the dumps for some reason, Sally had, with a wink, slipped him a white china mug of sugary coffee laden with top cream and a few spoonfuls of cocoa powder. It was delicious and he was savoring it with small sips to make it last.

The events of the past week had turned Andy's orderly world upside down for the second time this year, forcing him to re-examine the ways in which he compartmentalized people... much the same as Slim's neatly labeled cubbies in his rolltop desk. There were wide slots for people Andy knew well—his brother, Jess and Jonesy, friends and neighbors, some folks in town (not so well), and narrow ones for those with whom he had limited contact—mostly stage passengers and travelers passing by. There was a small one for 'manly' men—rough-and-tough, whiskey-drinking, hard-riding, fist-fighting, gunslinging cowboys and outlaws... men like Jess Harper. A bigger slot for ranchers and family men like Slim—ordinary men who _sometimes_ wore guns, frequented saloons, used swear words and occasionally got into a fracas. Andy didn't remember much about his father but assumed he could be safely lumped in with these along with, say, Sheriff Corey and Doctor Whatleigh. Into the 'not-manly' slot went farmers and townies... clerks, merchants, teachers, preachers, barbers and bankers, old people—who also had families but nothing to do with guns, alcohol, fighting or improper language. Luca Giancomo and Lindsay McNutt lived in that one. Some folks—Slim and Jess—occupied more than one cubby.

Women were a lot simpler—Regular Women (his ma, his friends' mothers, ranchers' and farmers' wives and townie wives), Girls (all ages until they got married), and Bad Women—like the pretty ladies who were _not_ wives and mothers and lived in the big house called the Prairie Rose on the corner of First Avenue and Second Street, who would sit out on the verandah in their frilly wrappers combing out one another's freshly-washed hair, waving gaily and blowing kisses as folks walked, rode or drove by on their way to church on Sunday morning. If Slim or Jonesy were driving the buckboard, they kept their eyes glued to the horses' behinds and told Andy not to look. If Jess was driving, he waved and hooted back, returning the air kisses, saying something like 'Ain't that jus' the purtiest sight you ever seen?'

Up until that highly informative impromptu seminar a few months back wherein Jess had elucidated on the subject of human sexuality, Andy hadn't given much thought to babies in general. And up until this past week, it was his understanding that baby management was the sole domain of womenfolk. Baby wrangling was not the concern of a real man aside from _his_ part in getting that baby started.

In the dim recesses of Andy's mind he understood that when (and _if_ ) a man survived to a ripe old age—say, twenty-five or thirty—he was expected to pick out a suitable female, marry her, settle down, have children. Andy understood that a whole lot of folks—mostly women—thought it was long past time for Slim to have got around to this, whereas Slim's friends seemed to think he ought to be commended for having avoided it for so long! It wasn't a subject Andy and his brother'd ever talked about and he wasn't sure he was gonna like it when it did happen... having some strange female move in, bossing them around and dropping babies right, left and sideways! He wouldn't be here, of course—he'd be far away at school in St. Louis... but would there still be a place for him when he came home on holidays? It was a worrisome prospect.

Jonesy defied categorization. He'd been a father and a family man in the distant past. He knew how to use a pistol or rifle or shotgun when he needed to. He knew an awful lot about horses although he didn't like them. Exactly when Jonesy had come to live with them Andy couldn't remember, but it was soon after his father died. Andy's adored mother had gone into a lingering decline afterward. Although it had barely been two years since Mary Grace had passed, his memories of her were mostly reduced to a pale quilt-wrapped wraith on the fainting couch, reading and sleeping while Jonesy took on more and more of the household chores—cooking, cleaning, laundry, sewing... and nursing. Jonesy could play the piano, although he hadn't in a long while. Jonesy was an enigma.

The ongoing presence of Misses Emmaline, Sally and Peach presented another problem for Andy Sherman—being unlike any other women he'd ever known, none of them fit into a definable category. And Miss Emma and the Koskis were ancients but far from useless! And nuns... he'd never encountered one before. Jonesy'd had to explain that they were religious women, married to God, who wore uniforms, would never marry real men or have babies!

So... yes... Andy was confused on a number of levels, having been raised these past four years in an all-male household, which he knew wasn't normal... and now sharing houseroom with a horde of non-relatives... also not normal. On top of that, he was feeling (with much guilt) disappointed that Jess wasn't behaving as manly as Andy expected of him. Sure... he was kind and nurturing to animals, as Andy himself was... but... a _baby?_

 **Sally was the first to reference Kim's absence** , as the serving line dwindled to none and Emmaline began removing dishes from the table. "Don't forget to put aside a plate for Kim—he hasn't eaten anything yet and he barely had two mouthfuls at dinner..."

"We're not running a twenty-four-hour restaurant here..." Emmaline snapped. "Andy, go tell him to get his butt on out here or he'll go hungry until lunchtime."

"He ain't in the bedroom, Miss Emma..." Quickly amending that to 'isn't' at her frown.

"He's not?" Sally queried. "Where is he, then?"

Andy shrugged. "I seen... saw... him go out a long time ago, just when we started eatin'. Thought he was goin' to the outhouse or sumpin'."

"Do you have any idea where he might've got off to?"

"No, m'am."

"I wouldn't worry, Sally," Emma said, "He pulled the same disappearing act on Monday, after you left. I sent Roop out to track him down. Maybe Roop knows..."

Sally puttered around for a few more minutes before taking off the apron she was wearing over a blouse and skirt, her overalls still in the laundry. "Mind if I take off? Everything seems to be under control here..."

She took a handful of clementines from a basket on the counter, stashing them in a skirt pocket, and took a canteen from a hook just inside the kitchen door. Emmaline followed her outside, closing the door behind them.

"Salviah Louise!"

Sally halted immediately and turned around. Force of habit. Emmaline never employed her full name unless she meant business. The aunt caught up to her and laid a detaining hand on her niece's arm.

"You be careful!" Emmaline commanded, then, faltering, "He isn't... he's not..."

"I'm _always_ careful," Sally returned, gently, with a cheeky grin. "Give me some credit, Auntie..."

"That's not what I meant..."

"What _do_ you mean, then?"

"I... it's just that... don't let your heart go where you can't follow..."

Knowing her aunt only had her welfare and best interest at heart, Sally decided to be honest. "Em, I'm not too sure where my head or my heart are right now... or his. We need to talk, he and I... just talk... away from other people... and, yes, I _know_ he's married. I have no intention of breaking up a happy home... if that's what it is, which I suspect may not be the case. But I want to hear whatever he has to say about it..."

"Men always find excuses to cheat on their wives," Emmaline said unhappily, "and lie to them. Always."

"I know that, too. But I'm also prepared to consider mitigating factors. The best I can promise you is that nothing's going to happen... not today, anyway. That may change in the future. Or it may not. Depends on what I hear..."

"Sally... wait... there's something you should see first..."

Emmaline pulled the folded flyer from an apron pocket and handed it over. Sally read it with a blank expression that was the envy of every poker player in Laramie.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Sheriff Corey gave it to Slim yesterday."

"Has Kim seen it?"

"No... just them, Freddy, Lychee, myself... and now you. Morton didn't get a good look at Kim so he didn't make a connection. Oh... and Andy knows ... but he knows not to say anything."

"So Slim's not planning to turn him in? That's a hell of a lot of money..."

"We're in general agreement that that's not a preferred option at this time," Emmaline said primly. "Not until we have a clearer understanding of what it is Kim's supposed to have done to merit this sort of attention. Unfortunately, Morton _did_ note his presence as stranger in these parts. He'll be back, and most likely will insist on Kim being presented in person fairly soon. He'll have questions."

"How do you propose to get around that?" Sally had moved over to the well pump to fill the canteen, Emmaline following. The nuns, still scurrying around in attendance to the laundry, ignored them.

"We... I... believe I can disguise his appearance enough to deceive the sheriff... and we—all of us—should revert to using his _nom de guerre_ of 'Sky Lizard' if any outsiders are about."

"When were you planning on sharing this with Kim?"

"I didn't have a specific time... sometime between breakfast and lunch, I suppose..."

"All the more reason for me to go and find him, don't you think... and explain his position?"

"It would seem so."

"There's a possibility that this might frighten him into bolting."

"Then you must talk him out of it, Salviah. Calm his fears and bring him back to us. I've acquired a liking for the young man, no matter what he's done. He deserves the chance to be heard, to get his feet on solid ground, as did Jess when he first arrived."

"I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for everything, Auntie... don't worry." With that, Sally turned and walked away to confer with Roop out where he and his brothers were reinforcing the pole corral. A few minutes later she strode to the pasture fence and whistled for Tar Baby who immediately trotted to the gate. Sally let her through, clipped a lead to her halter, and leaped effortlessly up onto the broad bare back.

Stepping outside the door to empty a basin of dishwater, Emmaline let out a long, aggrieved sigh, knowing there was no hope of deterring her headstrong niece from any course of action she chose to pursue—rash or otherwise. She watched Sally ride away, black skirt billowing out over the animal's haunches—a valkyrie on the hunt for a fallen warrior...

 **Out on the front porch,** conversation paused.

"How in hell does she do that?" Lychee mused.

"She's got thighs like a bullfrog and knees like a bench vise," Slim said, lost in admiration and forgetting for an instant he was standing next to the woman's brother. He blushed crimson and apologized all over himself for the gaffe.

Young Doc was grinning. In a fake Scots accent he intoned, "Dinna fash yersel', laddie. We all already know."

"You... you do? Everyone?" Slim was mortified.

"Everyone who counts," Young Doc said. "As head of family, I suppose I should be demanding your intentions... however, Sally's her own woman and I already _know_ her intentions. She isn't planning on marrying _you_ , Slim... she's not in love with you. I hope you know that."

"Yeah... I know that. We've talked about it. But I do love her, Fred, in my way... I hope _you_ know _that._ "

"I do. Where d'you s'pose she's off to?" her brother asked.

"No idea. But I noticed she had a canteen so must be planning to be gone for a while."

The trio resumed their discussion of what to do about Kim. After unanimously agreeing that blindly turning him in was a dead issue... for the present... Slim earnestly petitioned Young Doc to be allowed to ride out to where the unmarked cattle were being held.

"Just for a little while... an hour... I need to be sure some of those mavericks aren't the neighbor's," the rancher pleaded. "I've got a good relationship with Bartlett and I want to keep it that way!"

Young Doc shook his head. "No. Not until that cough lets up to my satisfaction. If you feel you can't wait, we can send one of the Bobs to ask Gar to come up here... or I suppose I could swing by on my way home..." The Bartlett ranchhouse was some four miles closer to town and only a quarter-mile off the stage road.

"How would you know which cattle are yours and which are his?" Lychee inquired, curious. "A slick's a slick, isn't it?"

"Any solid blacks are almost certainly his... he's working on a pure Angus herd. I'm sticking with whiteface. Was hoping to get one or maybe even two Hereford bulls for this season but there just wasn't the money for it. Maybe next year..."

"Maybe," Lychee agreed blandly.

"You planning on leaving today?" Slim asked the doctor.

"Gotta... people still get sick from other things besides measles... and hurt. And have babies. And die. Or die having babies."

"I suppose," Slim replied glumly.

"But before I go, we _are_ having that meeting."

 **Further conversation was curtailed** by the arrival in the yard of a spring wagon and an outrider... speak of the devil! Garland Bartlett astride one of his shiny bay Morgans with his brand-new son-in-law Billy Sol Baumgartner manning the reins to a pair of equally glossy bays. A heavily pregnant Emmy Lou Baumgartner, née Bartlett, sat next to him. The cargo area of the wagon was heaped with unidentifiable bundles, a few baskets and a wooden box with air holes drilled in the sides, on which sat Andy's best friend Tommy Bartlett.

Gar Barlett dismounted and stepped up on the porch to shake hands all around, leaving weedy be-pimpled Billy Sol to assist his sallow wife down from the wagon's padded seat.

"Mornin' Doc, Lychee... Slim, you look better'n I expected." Bartlett was a short man with a round congenial face and a loud booming voice that brought Andy to the door with a wide grin as he spotted Tommy.

"Hey there, Andy... you look like one a my coonhound bitch's spotted pups!" Bartlett harharharred.

"Doc..." Andy appealed, "Can I go out... please? Just for a little while... while Tommy's here?"

Young Doc rolled his eyes. "I've heard this opera before! All right... but wear a jacket and don't do anything that'll make you sweaty."

"Gee... thanks, Doc!" In two seconds the boy blasted through the door in his boots, buttoning his jacket as he went.

Tommy got up, picking up the box he'd been sitting on. "Brought ya sumpin'," he grunted, handing it down to his buddy and nodding in the direction of the zoo pens. Suspicious noises were coming from the box.

"I hope that isn't what I think it is," Slim gritted.

"Sorry... but it is," Bartlett allowed sorrowfully. "Warn't my idea. Marilyn insisted. Said every boy needs a dog and every barn needs a cat." Marilyn was Gar's wife and a woman of strong convictions, very much like Emmaline was and Mary Grace Sherman had been. One didn't argue with her when she had a bee in her bonnet, as Slim well knew. The year the war ended, Gar and Marilyn had taken up an abandoned homestead adjoining the Shermans' and become great friends although they were a decade older.

"I wasn't really planning on letting Andy having a puppy... seeing as how he'll be going away to school next year..." Slim commented.

"Well, by then they'll be growed up enough you and Jess'll have you a good pair a huntin' dogs!"

"Pair?" Slim repeated faintly. "There's two in there?"

"And a pair a kitty cats, too!" the neighbor beamed.

"In the same box... didn't they, er... fight?" Lychee asked.

"Yep," Bartlett confirmed happily. "Damn sure did, for about five minutes. Then they got over it, just like our young 'uns."

About that time, the two boys unlidded the box. Two highly agitated half-grown cats and a pair of overexcited Walker pups streaked out among the chickens, which set up such a ruckus that all of Andy's pets that had a voice felt compelled to join. Every horse and mule in the pasture rushed to the fence to see what was going on, contributing a chorus of neighs and brays. The men had to shout to be heard above the din.

"GOT ANY COFFEE?" Bartlett yelled.

"WE ALWAYS GOT COFFEE!" Jonesy yelled from just inside the door, face wreathed in smiles, always pleased to see Garland Bartlett—a kind and generous neighbor, quick to help out anyone in need. Best of all, Gar never failed to find the sunny side to any situation. He'd been immensely helpful to a certain former young lieutenant struggling to regain his civilian landlegs in a post-war world. Jonesy would be forever grateful to him for that alone.

"GOT PIE, TOO!" Jonesy added.

"NOT BEFORE LUNCH!" Emmaline's voice could be heard from way back in the parlor.

"WE'D BETTER GO IN," Slim shouted.

They all trooped inside, Slim holding the door in his gentlemanly way for Emmy Lou as her new husband didn't have the sense or manners to do that.

Lychee, on crutches, hobbled in last while making a mental note of Slim Sherman's need for a good bull. His newest client would be interested in that piece of intel and would no doubt want to add that to the list of assignments for his counselor/facilitator. Lychee didn't know squat about cattle. He'd have to do some reading up on that breed Slim had mentioned and then research the best place to obtain one.

 **No... they wouldn't be staying** for lunch, thank you... had a late breakfast, Bartlett announced as Emmaline prepared to play hostess (with Mary Grace's good china) and they settled at the parlor table. They'd just come to deliver a few things they thought might come in useful here and Emmy Lou needed a breath of fresh air—she was due to foal at Christmas. Besides, the Shermans had company coming... quite a bit of company, looked like.

Slim sat up in alarm. No no no! Not _more_ people!

"How do you know?"

Gar nodded toward his daughter, who hadn't said a word but just sat there looking glum. "Emmy Lou ain't got a lick a sense but her eyesight's fine as frog hair... when we was turnin' off onto the stage road she seen a line a buggies er wagons a-comin' from the direction a town... maybe a half mile back... orter be here directly."

He nodded a gimlet eye toward his feckless son-in-law. "Billy Sol, you get yerself on out there and round up a couple a them Koski boys I seen loungin' over by the corral... get 'em to help ya unload the buckboard. Slim, you got somebody can tell 'em where ya want things to go?"

"The Koskis'll know."

"Well, then... lemme tell ya why I'm here..." Over coffee and in his roundabout way, the garrulous neighbor explained his unannounced visit...

Yesterday'd been hog-killin' day, he said, and it seemed he'd miscalculated and slaughtered one too many to fit in his smokehouse and he'd run out of brine barrels. Would Slim be so kind as to take it off his hands? No sense letting good fresh meat spoil! It was already dressed and quartered and ready to be hung or brined down. Their garden had done exceptionally well this season—Marilyn and the girls had put up dozens and dozens of Mason jars of fruits and vegetables. Would Jonesy accept some in exchange for a couple bottles of his special liniment? Oh... and they had an excess of young chickens that were not only costing him a fortune in feed but the Bartletts were plumb sick of eating yardbird—would it be all right to just turn 'em loose here? On and on he went, with the occasional apology for any difficulty this might place on the Sherman household...

Slim had a hard time containing laughter at Gar's elaborately fabricated fallacies about why this or that item on the wagon was surplus to needs at his own ranch. Marilyn was sorry she couldn't make it today but their youngest was down with the croup... and speaking of babies—that one was walking now and she was adamant he'd be the _last_ one! So a box full of infant clothing was being handed down the Sherman's way for that orphaned Indian child they'd taken in... and another box of canned puréed baby food...

There was no way Slim could refuse his friend and neighbor's largesse... because this was what folks did for one another out here—as Young Doc had just reminded him yesterday!

Getting up to take his leave, Bartlett went over to slap Jess on the back. "Son, I got a half-dozen green colts gonna need breakin' come spring. I want you to do it, y'hear? You pay attention to what ole Doc says and you'll be up and at 'em in no time..."

As they were getting the mother-to-be resettled on the seat of the now-emptied wagon, Bartlett turned to Slim.

"Anyone mention me and Tom ran inta yer roundup crew yesterday? No? Well... we was doin' a preliminary check on our own stock and stopped for a confab with Roop. Hope ya don't mind but we rode over to where them mavericks is and I had me a quick look-see. Spotted a couple a solid blacks prob'ly outta my herd but the rest of 'em are whitefaces... don't want 'em myself. We'll be roundin' up our stock next week... more to the north a where yer folks was. If we come acrost any more a them whitefaces, okay with you if we turn 'em in with yourn?"

Bartlett finally paused to take a breath and Slim jumped in to assure him he didn't mind at all... any of it... and reiterated his thanks for everything.

"Shoot, son... ain't nuthin' you wouldn't a done for me and mine!"

As the Bartlett entourage wheeled out of the yard onto the road, Emmy Lou's advertised cavalcade of wagons wheeled in, along with an elegant black lacquered closed carriage drawn by a four-in-hand of black horses.

 _CHAPTER THIRTY—PART TWO_

 **A MEETING COMES TO ORDER**

 _ **Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but**_

 _ **getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough**_

 _ **to see is what you would have wanted had you known."**_ _(Garrison Keillor)_

 **Late afternoon...** When Andy was inclined to visit his special place—his Thinking Rock, an erratic left by the last retreating Ice Age glacier—he could, hand over hand, ascend the bluff behind the barn and attain the summit in ten minutes. His best descent time was six minutes, unless he missed a hand- or foot-hold and bounced and buffeted his way to the bottom, in which case he could arrive in as little as sixty seconds.

Kim had elected once again to take the long way around—up the hill on the stage road until reaching a hospitable incline and then circling back—a mile-and-half trek on foot which had taken him almost an hour to achieve. Sally, on horseback, had made it in a matter of minutes, discounting the time it'd taken her to pick up his trail. She found him exactly where Roop had said—his battered body comfortably arranged against the sun-warmed face of the boulder, eyes closed against the sun and sheltered from the wind. She simply sat nearby on the flattened, dried grass, waiting for him to take the lead, gradually edging closer until finally they sat side by side.

In the hours that passed, questions were delicately posed and answered, desires wistfully expressed, possibilities explored and rejected... and unpleasant, unavoidable factualities confronted and debated. But—wisely—no declarations, promises or assurances were... or could be... made.

It was getting on toward late afternoon when they both realized the sun had disappeared behind a bank of leaden clouds and the temperature had dropped disagreeably. The morning breeze had given way to strong gusty wind. Sally suggested they start back, but getting Kim up onto the tall mare's back proved unworkable. The week of inactivity, the ongoing pain of his broken ribs and injured shoulder, and the energy expended just to get there had robbed him of all strength except enough to walk at a slow and, at times, unsteady pace.

Sally and Kim proceeded on foot down the road toward home, with Tar Baby placidly ambling alongside. By the time they came in sight of the ranch and outbuildings, he was admittedly dragging and shivering inside his light jacket. She'd come out jacketless and he'd gallantly offered his, to which she'd laughed.

As they entered the yard in the gathering dusk, Sally frowned, looking around. It was quiet... too quiet... and deserted. There should have been more horses in the pasture. Light showed through the partially open barn door, so someone had to be working in there—lit lanterns were never left unattended. An inquiring whinny from Tar Baby elicited responses from inside the barn—if horses had been restored to their stalls in there, where were the nuns?

The chickens had been put up. A fire was burning in the side yard, steam spiraling off the washboiler. Oil lamps illuminated the canvas walls of the bathhouse from the inside and moving shadows indicated inhabitants. More yellow light glowed through the windows of the residence and a steady stream of smoke emanated from the combined stack of the parlor fireplace and kitchen stove. Smoke trickled from the _vardo's_ crooked chimney and thin bands of light escaped its shuttered windows. It, too, was occupied. But there was no chatter of human voices.

When Sally attempted to turn Tar Baby into the pasture, the mare balked and neighed, ears pricked toward the barn. A loud, annoyed, answering whinny from within signaled that her biological brother and stablemate, Young Doc's gelding, was quartered inside. This was different. A quick perusal of the pasture revealed that _all_ the saddle horses were stabled. The stage horses, accustomed to overnighting in pasture, were huddled together under a grove of cottonwoods. Translated, bad weather was expected.

"We need to get you inside first..." she said to Kim, who was weaving slightly. He merely nodded in response. He'd seen everything she had, of course, but none of it was registering. All he could think of was getting indoors away from that biting wind.

"Come on..." With one hand still clutching the mare's lead and the other supporting an elbow, she directed him toward the front porch. Roop came out of the barn then and intercepted them.

"I take horz. Djoo go inside, quick!" It was more like Tar Baby took him, dragging the little old man as she happily trotted toward the barn. Then it was up the porch steps, with a minor stumble on Kim's part, and in through the front door into the enveloping warmth of the parlor.

 **Emmaline, laying the combined tables** for supper, straightened up as a blast of cold air and a flutter of dry leaves accompanied the arrivals. A sweeping glance with a raised eyebrow took in their rather disheveled appearance... clothing speckled with bits of dried grass and leaf litter, windblown hair. Her expression was questioning but she kept her welcome carefully neutral and benign.

"Just in time for supper. Looks like you could use it. I was about to send out a St. Bernard with a brandy keg."

Oh, good... she's in good humor, Sally was thinking. "Sorry. Had to walk back and it took a while. He couldn't manage the horse. What's happened? Where is everyone?"

"Much to tell. Supper will be another thirty minutes, at least. You two should wash up and get into warmer clothes. No time for the bathhouse, I'm afraid."

Some of the more ambitious and wealthier homeowners provided for fireplaces in private bedrooms, but not so the Sherman residence. Here, a half-sized potbellied stove in each of the two bedrooms augmented sleeping comfort provided by quilts and hot bricks wrapped in flannel. The core of the house was warmed by the central hearth and the cookstove. Sally realized her aunt was already in her nightwear, the hem of a heavy winter-weight flannel nightgown showing from beneath a heavy terry robe securely corded at the waist. Her feet were encased in sheepswool-lined mocs and her hair was down in the customary loosely-woven single plait. Certainly not normal attire for a company dinner... or any meal.

"Andrew, we need two pitchers of hot water, if you please!" Emmaline called to the kitchen.

"Coming right up!"

The next unlikely sight was Andy in blue pajamas over longjohns, robe, house slippers and Peach's apron, with a steaming pitcher in each hand.

"Hi, Miss Sally... hi, Kim. Where do you want these, Miss Emma?"

"One goes to Miss Sally. Take the other to the back bedroom and help Kim change..."

"Yes m'am." The prospective assistant set down one of the pitchers on the corner of the table. Kim was about to open his mouth and protest that he didn't need assistance, then thought better of it and followed the boy without objection. As unbalanced as he was feeling right now he wasn't at all sure that if he bent over he wouldn't keep going until he met the floor.

 **Taking her own pitcher from the table** and heading toward the front bedroom, Sally made note of changes not only in the room but in the general atmosphere of the ranch. Missing: Men—Slim, Jess, her brother Fred, the three Koskis, the two Bobs—and, oh yes... the nuns. Missing: The usual clamor of Peach in the kitchen, a one-woman brass band of clangs and bangs. Odd: Andy apparently presiding over kitchen operations. Normal: Jonesy sound asleep as close to the blazing fireplace as he could reasonably inch the rocker without it bursting into flame. Different: Two black-and-white tuxedo kittens nestled in his lap and a pair of tri-color coonhound pups in a basket at his feet, lying side by side with their fat pink bellies aimed toward the heat. New: An elaborately carved antique cradle fitted at two pivot points onto a stable frame so that it swung back and forth—at the moment stationary with a peacefully sleeping Lily in it. Interesting: An unusually large stockpile of stovewood stacked between the corner of the room and the edge of the fireplace.

Suitably layered in longjohns under her own flannel gown and thick robe, with woolen socks in lined moccasins, Sally returned to the parlor. In the extra time she'd taken to comb out and replait her hair, Andy had delivered Kim back to the parlor in a pair of Jess' longjohns under his own blue pajamas, with a proper flannel robe, one of Jonesy's old ones. He was now installed in one of the easy chairs with a quilt and his wool-socked feet perilously close to the open fire, awake but evidently lost in private contemplation, chilled hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea.

 **Sally proceeded to the kitchen** where Andy was alternately stirring, adding salt and pepper, and tasting. Emmaline was slicing bread and dishing butter from a large crock into smaller serving dishes.

"There's fresh coffee if you want it, Miss Sally," the youngster offered with a shy smile. He seemed completely at home at the stove. Sally made a mental note that when Jacob was old enough, she was going to make a point of teaching him to cook and feed himself.

"Thanks, I do. What's on the menu?"

"Antelope stew. I made it all by myself, too!" Behind him at the work counter, Emmaline gave a muffled snort. He added, hastily, "Well... with Miss Emma tellin' me how... here... you want a taste?" He dipped out spoonful and offered it.

Sally took it, blew on it a minute or two, and tasted... with figuratively crossed fingers. In three decades she hadn't known her aunt to so much as boil a pot of water. But it was actually quite good, if a little heavy on garlic and pepper. Her eyes watered just a little.

"Excellent!" she proclaimed, as Andy beamed with proud accomplishment. "Roop shot it when they was... were... out hauling hay to the mama cows and calves. He hopes maybe to get another one tomorrow when they take more hay out. There's a storm comin', Sheriff Corey said. They came and got the nun ladies today and took 'em to town 'cause the river's gone down enough to cross at the ford. Mister Wing sent his own carriage to get 'em and..." Andy paused to take a breath, "Mister Lychee and Mister Lucky went back, too. Mister Lucky brung... brought... us supplies in a spring wagon he borried... borrowed from Huckaby's Mercantile and Mister BobCat and Mister PlumbBob went inta... into... town to send telegrams home but they'll be back tomorrow and are gonna stay for a while and Miss Emma's sent Miss Peach home..."

Sally grinned and held up a hand. "Whoa there, kid! I think I've got the picture now... thanks... I'll wait to hear the rest of it until we're seated, if that's okay with you."

Emmaline took over. "Fred and Slim are helping Jess bathe... they'll be in shortly. Morton said Fort Washakie telegraphed bad weather moving our way—possibly sleet or snow. He wanted to get the women into suitable quarters as quickly as possible. Lee Wing offered the use of his closed coach—a generous if unprecedented gesture. The Dominicans will be doubling up with the Carmelites in my home until further notice... I've sent Peach on to take charge of the household. The Bobs wanted to advise their wives of their good health and whereabouts, but they should return tomorrow if weather and road conditions permit. We do have other business to discuss over dinner but..."

They were interrupted by a clattering at the front door as Young Doc maneuvered Jess's wheelchair over the threshold, preceded by Slim. When he spotted Sally his face lit up and he rushed toward her. She barely had time to set down her coffee before being swept up in a bear hug and kissed on the cheek, caught completely off guard because a tenet of their relationship was no public demonstration of affection... ever. And, of course, she'd no knowledge of the prior conversation in which her own brother had let the proverbial cat out of the proverbial bag.

"I was so worried! Thought maybe you'd got lost. Would've gone looking hours ago but that bastard brother of yours wouldn't let me... where were you?" His troubled blue eyes searched her brown ones. It took enormous effort of will to not disengage, to not let her eyes stray over his shoulder toward that other individual sitting oh so quietly and unmoving by the fireplace.

"Don't be silly, Matthew. I know my way around." Sally gently extricated herself on the pretense of having to finish setting the table. There was no benefit in not being truthful. To a point. "Kim wandered off and I went to round him up before _he_ got lost, is all. Which he did... but I found him—eventually—and then we had to walk back 'cause he couldn't ride."

"I see," Slim said, although he didn't, really. Fortunately, hunger overrode any other lingering concerns. As it did Jess, who was deftly maneuvering his wheelchair and inserting it into its reserved space at the foot of the dining board.

"We eatin' pretty soon, I hope? Whatever that is sure do smell good!"

It then came to Sally's attention that all three of them—Slim, Fred and Jess—were also wearing robes over the ubiquitous blue pajamas over longjohns. So was Jonesy, for that matter.

"What's this?" Sally quipped. "Are we having another slumber party?"

"What's a slumber party?" Jess asked suspiciously. "And when did we have one? Did I miss somethin'?"

"Never mind. Let's eat. I'm famished!" Young Doc slid into a chair, leaving the head for his aunt. Slim seated himself opposite. Sally summoned Kim to the table, indicating he should sit at the doctor's left, which put him directly across the table from her. Jonesy had awakened when the bathing party came in. He took the chair to Jess' left.

When all the comestibles had been delivered to the table and beverages of choice poured, Andy took his place between Kim and Jess and everyone tucked in.

"Aren't the Koskis joining us this evening?" Sally asked.

"I invited them," Emmaline shrugged, "but they declined. They're having some sort of traditional meal celebrating the advent of winter... I couldn't possibly pronounce it, but it involves mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, mushrooms, leeks, lingonberries, beer... and reindeer steak sautéed in reindeer fat. Disgusting, I say, what some foreigners eat!"

"Where'd they get reindeer?" Jess asked.

"Not real ones..." Andy piped up. "They're pretendin' antelope is... are... reindeer."

"I'm confused," Jonesy said.

"Never mind, dear," Emmaline said, "Just eat your stew."

Sally had thoughtfully distributed tumblers to every place, and a pitcher of ice cold well water... which was soon needed. An entire loaf of bread quickly disappeared. As everyone was already clued in to the identity of the preparer, no one made any remarks about the overabundance of pepper and garlic, other than it was the most excellent presentation of antelope they'd ever enjoyed. Felicitations to the chef! Andy was blushing with satisfaction at his culinary achievement.

 **Toward the conclusion of the meal,** Young Doc tapped a spoon on his water glass for attention.

"Since we're all here... finally..." He cast a baleful eye at his sister. "This would be an excellent time to have that meeting... and Slim, don't look at me in that tone of voice... Now then, everyone's turned in a list, just as I asked. Everyone except you, Slim. Why is that?"

Slim was staring straight ahead, lips compressed in a scowl and a cheek muscle twitching. "Already told you... I'm not calling in favors and I'm not accepting charity. We'll get by somehow. Always have."

"I'm talking about liquidating some assets here... and the barter system, Slim..."

"What assets, exactly?" Slim inquired acidly. "And what've we got that someone else wants?"

Young Doc arched an eyebrow. "Why... cattle, of course."

"Oh no... I'm not selling any breeding stock... and no one's buying cattle right now, Doc."

"By the Sisters' tally—and by your own admission—you've got about a hundred seventy more head than you _thought_ you had. Everyone else shipped out their market stock in September, leaving none for local consumers. You're the only rancher around with any decent beef left. Roughly half the citizens of this county are non-farmers but they still want fresh meat on their tables. None of the three butchers in town have room behind their stores for abattoirs large enough to hold more than one or two cows at a time, so animals have to be brought in on the hoof every other day or so—if they can even _find_ any for sale. Then they gotta travel to get 'em and bring 'em back—which means time away from their businesses."

"Are you suggesting I herd three or four cows to town two or three times a week? Can't spare the time!"

"Not you personally... The Koskis plan to head on home pretty soon, but they're leaving the _vardo_ here for a while. You know we have quite a few other elderly cowpokes out there at the Rocking W who're still able to ride. Quite frankly, they're bored spitless. They'd be tickled to death to be given some kind of useful work. We can rotate 'em out in pairs. They'd be the ones driving those cows to town, helping with the teams when the stage is running again, doing odd jobs around here. Em and I'll provide their grub. All they'd need is a map locating the fenced pastures and some guidelines as to which cattle you want to cull. This was Feets' idea and a good one, I think. He's right proud of it."

"I'll think about it," Slim said, somewhat ungraciously. "I'd be losing money on anything not up to market weight."

"Not necessarily... Alphonse DeNamur wants to set up a sideline as 'purveyor of gourmet cuts'—including veal—to epicureans with deep pockets. He's willing to double the going rate per pound of any suitable stock you can provide, which means he's going to triple or quadruple the retail price of young beef versus mature beef. In other words, those yearlings and out-of-season calves are worth just as much now as they will be in a year and half when you'd normally sell 'em... plus you won't bear the cost of overwintering."

"Calves at heel aren't a problem but I'm not comfortable with the ethics of claiming all those mavericks."

Young Doc shrugged. "I don't know cattle but I know the law... if there's mavericks in with your stock and they're on your land, then they're yours. I wouldn't worry too much about ethics unless one of your neighbors calls you on it... and then he'd have to prove ownership, which isn't likely unless he's running some exotic breed that's obviously different from yours—like Bartlett and his Angus... and you already heard what he had to say about it."

Slim opened his mouth. Young Doc cheerfully rolled right over him, fishing a paper out of a robe pocket. "I consolidated everyone's notes into a single list. This is where barter comes in... First entry, 'cattle, comma, winter pasture'. Well, we can scratch that off. Next entry, 'hay.' Your neighbor to the north..."

"George Gantry..."

"Yeah... him... he got a good yield on his hay fields this year... says he'd dicker on trading a couple wagonloads for a steer or two."

"I guess I could do that." Grudgingly said.

"Firewood. According to Earnest Livingston there's enough deadfall timber in the woods where your properties adjoin to keep both ranches in firewood over the winter and then some. He's already got a couple of his sons in there with a yoke of oxen. Says he'll skid yours out while they're at it, buck 'em into rounds, split 'em and deliver 'em... he'll be pleased to trade for beef as well..."

"But I..." Slim was still being resistant.

"Unmarked cattle. Before the Koskis and the Bobs leave, they're gonna take care of that."

 **Young Doc plowed on,** impervious to Slim's dark looks or any attempt to have a say. Young Doc kept bringing up new items. It took another hour to address every issue. "Any other ranch business anyone else wants to bring up he didn't think of before?" No one did. Slim himself couldn't think of a single concern that had been left out and was showing signs of knuckling under as Young Doc demolished, one by one, each of his objections. He started to get up and Fred motioned him to stay put.

"I'm not done. Let's talk about who will be responsible for what in the next few weeks... beginning with you, Slim. You are _not_ to perform any strenuous activities—outside or inside—through the end of next week. If any of you catch him at it, you have my permission to whomp him upside the head. We want him to recover as speedily as possible. Are we agreed?"

There was a chorus of hearty 'yessirs' around the table and everyone put on their best stern expressions for Slim's benefit while trying to suppress laughter."

"Pretty much the same goes for Jonesy, who—as we're all now aware—has an ongoing osteopathic condition which, sadly, will not improve in time. I've told him what he can and can't do. No more heavy lifting. No more carrying buckets of water or loads of firewood. If you see him doing it, stop him, even if you have to hogtie him to a chair."

Barely restrained titters greeted Jonesy's poked-out lower lip but he slowly nodded his head in agreement.

"Andy will be the first to recover... but again, until the end of next week, light duties only. I absolutely do not want him being outside for any extended length of time or getting chilled. Same goes for you, Slim."

Young Doc stopped to clear his throat. "Now, Andrew turned in a most impressive list of all he plans to do to help out. I admire your resolve and intentions, young man, and best of luck in carrying them out, as I'm sure you'll be able. But this must not be at the expense of your studies! I'm sure Slim agrees with me there. Please don't hesitate to ask for assistance if you feel you can't handle something... or if you feel you've too heavy a load on your shoulders. Promise?"

"I promise." Looking at his brother, Andy vowed, "I'll make you proud, Slim. I will."

Slim smiled. "I know you will."

"Jess..." Young Doc began, "I wasn't too sure what to do with your list as it appears you're under the impression you can't do much of anything important. I've given it to Slim."

Jess shrugged. "Yeah... well... it's all little picky stuff, not like real work."

Slim spoke quietly. "You've been around long enough to know there's more to running a ranch than riding a horse all day... half the work _is_ the picky stuff. Like all that torn-up tack piling up in the barn that you wrote down you're going to repair? You may not think it's important... but it sure would save a bundle of money if it all got fixed and we didn't have to buy replacements. I've watched you do leatherwork and you're real good at it. You've got sharp eyes, too... there's things on your list I've never even begun to think about and probably wouldn't ever have got around to doing even if I had."

It was Jess' turn to blush under the praise. At any other time he might have laughed it off but he knew in his heart Slim was dead serious.

Sally, who'd been sitting quietly with the infant in her arms, exchanged a glance with Emmaline. Slim was getting into the spirit of things now and this was very, _very_ good!

"And another thing..." Slim pointed a finger, "It's high time you started learning recordkeeping."

"I don't know nothin' about keepin' records!" Jess protested.

"You'll learn! Just because you've got a busted leg doesn't mean you get to lay out of work. Since I'll be taking over most of your chores for the next three months, you'll have to shoulder some of mine... and if you think paperwork isn't real work, you've got another think coming! I need you to be able to handle any financial problems that come up whenever I'm away on business... like on a buying trip to Cheyenne." He gave Jess a playful slap on the back of the head and reseated himself. Sally got a surreptitious squeeze on the knee.

"All right boys," Young Doc interceded. "Now that we've established what everyone's gonna be doing... let's discuss caregiver schedules... all of you are recuperating nicely. I think I can reduce my visitations to once a week. You've got a routine of sorts established and, increasingly, you'll be able to help each other as needed. Sally and Emmaline have to go home soon... no ifs, ands or buts—they've businesses to run—but one or the other'll be coming in every day at least through next weekend. We'll see how things go then. There's another lady we might be able to arrange to come out as well. Any questions? No...?"

"Just one..." The quiet and unexpected statement took everyone by surprise and heads craned around to observe Kim.


	31. Chapter 31

_CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE—PART ONE_

 **IN THE HOUSE OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS**

" _ **In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger,**_

 _ **we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream**_

 _ **And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe."**_ _(Michael Jackson)_

" **What about me?"**

Young Doc blinked but didn't falter. "You know what your restrictions are, Kim. No heavy work for you, either..."

Doctor Wilfred Whatleigh wasn't a fool, understanding that he'd intruded into Slim's affairs as far as was necessary to ensure continuation of the family's health and welfare—and the keeping, over the coming winter months, of the Sherman ranch in general. Though not altogether reconciled, Slim seemed to accept that the Whatleighs had arranged all to good purpose. However, in this matter—disposition of the stranger in their midst—it was time for Slim to reassert his rightful position as head of household. That question had been directly posed to Slim, not to himself. Young Doc gave Slim a pointed look, indicating he should take the floor, and sat down.

Slim experienced a few confusing moments of disconnect... jumping from ranch business to health matters and now to what was to be done about their reluctant guest. He had to review, very rapidly, _who_ knew _what_...

First, the wanted flyer the sheriff had passed along yesterday: He and Young Doc and Emmaline had seen it... plus Andy, who'd been eavesdropping from the kitchen... but not Jonesy, Jess, Lychee or Kim, who'd been out on the front porch.

Second, the envelope containing the second poster and Lee Wing's report: Only Young Doc, Slim and Lychee (now back to town and sworn to secrecy), knew of the contents. Emmaline had taken advantage of a brief private moment with Slim to mention having passed along that first poster to Sally before the latter set out on her quest—most likely Kim was now aware of it. Slim had then shown Emmaline the second poster but withheld, on Fred's recommendation, the details of the accompanying report. He and Young Doc had been unable to reach an accord on how to handle _that_ information.

Kim had come to the table reluctantly, wouldn't have come at all except he'd missed breakfast _and_ lunch. He'd said not a word since being seated, keeping his eyes to the plate before him, until the opportunity arose to pose the question, _'What about me?'_ He sat back now, expressionless, for the first time engaging in direct eye contact with Slim.

 **This past week Slim'd had** —of the present company—the _least_ personal interaction with the man he himself had brought home and installed under the Sherman roof. Frankly, he'd been too caught up in his own illness and other concerns to give much consideration to how much of a danger his rescuee actually posed, if any. Given a choice, he would have been content to let that subject go unexamined just a little while longer. But Lee Wing's report had nudged the elephant into the room and Kim's question had shone a light on it.

Now, being in possession of information that was damning in some respects and exculpatory in others, Slim couldn't pretend it didn't exist. And Kim's query had backed him into a corner under the scrutiny of seven pairs of eyes. He had questions of his own, to be sure, and was trying to frame them in a context that wouldn't seem too threatening... or would give away that he knew more about his guest than had been admitted to so far. While he was inclined to decide in favor of continuing to shelter Kim rather than claim either of those extravagant rewards, he felt his final decision couldn't be predicated on a single factor— _would the man lie to him?_

"I showed him the wanted poster, Matthew," Sally interposed quietly while Slim was scrambling for the right words. "He had a right to know. He's every right to be concerned about what's going to happen to him now."

Well, hell, Slim thought. That certainly put a crimp in his considered approach. And now he was going to have to draw Jess and Jonesy, as well as his young brother, into a conspiracy which he'd hoped to avoid. Six pairs of eyes tracked back and forth between Slim and Kim like spectators at a tennis match.

"What wanted poster?" Jess finally growled in the resounding silence.

Sally took the poster from a skirt pocket and handed it to Jonesy, who quickly perused it and passed it over to Jess without comment. Jess read it, eyebrows knotted. Eyes widening at the staggering reward, looking briefly at the reverse in case there was additional information printed back there.

"It don't say what he's wanted for..."

Slim got up and walked over to the desk to withdraw, from the manila envelope hidden beneath the big green ranch ledger, the second wanted poster, currently folded in quarters. This he gave to Sally as he reseated himself, watching her profile as she unfolded and read it, expecting to see some sort of reaction. Mildly surprised when there wasn't any. She merely passed it down the table. Jess now had them both side by side for comparison. He looked up at Kim and grinned.

"I get it... this is some kinda joke, ain't it?"

But no one laughed. No one spoke. Kim hadn't relaxed for an instant, not even sparing a glance for this new evidence, which he _hadn't_ seen before. Jess began to realize something serious was afoot and the grin faded.

"Nobody puts up this kinda money unless... whaddya do, Kim? Steal a whole herd a horses? Rob a string of banks? Murder a buncha folks?" Jess strove to keep his tone light. Offhand those were the worst offenses he could think of, and he couldn't begin to fathom why anyone less than one of the truly legendary outlaws of their time would command such outrageous sums for his capture.

Kim declined to answer and Slim was obliged to speak up.

"Mort said the agent who left that smaller poster wouldn't tell him the reason behind it, but implied a death was involved. Is that the case, Kim... did you kill someone?"

"Yes." No hesitation on Kim's part... but nothing further.

"Is that it? Just... _yes?_ No explanation? No defense?" _Well, at least he didn't lie about it,_ Slim thought. Breaths were held all around the table.

"Just _one_ killin'?" Jess queried. Something wasn't right here. One dead person didn't justify that big a bounty... unless it was a very important someone like the President of the United States. And as far as Jess knew, that detested individual was still very much alive. He was beginning to grasp there were undercurrents of tension here which he didn't understand, because he'd been kept out of the loop... and _that,_ he didn't like. Not at all.

Jess was, in fact, verging on serious annoyance with the two of them. It wasn't like Slim to pussyfoot around a situation... if he had questions he usually asked them directly and expected direct answers. And right now Slim had a face full of questions he wasn't asking. This wasn't the no-nonsense, take-charge Slim Sherman on whom Jess relied. Too, there was something different about Kim. Not anything Jess could rightly put a finger on, but somehow the other appeared stronger, harder... less defensive and more challenging, though not openly defiant. This wasn't appropriately deferential behavior for someone who was a guest in someone else's home and it made Jess mad. Especially since his own emotions were now at odds.

The initial fear and suspicion that had attended Kim's arrival had been ameliorated by subsequent events and exchanges of personal confidences with the newcomer. His gut instinct was insisting Kim was worthy of association, of friendship. But this new information in the form of wanted posters was reminding him that misplaced trust could be fatal. Jess almost missed Kim's next words, uttered without inflection and without a glance in his direction.

" **Does it matter?"**

 _Hell yes it matters... or does it?_ Jess wished he could read Slim's mind right then, wished his partner would say something... anything... that would shed some light on what appeared to be a standoff of some sort, a test of wills. He couldn't contain himself any longer.

"Can I say somethin'?" he blurted out. All eyes, including Kim's, then swiveled in _his_ direction. When no one contested this request, he sucked in a deep breath and continued—not with any degree of confidence, because speechifying didn't come natural to him, but with a deep conviction that _someone_ had to break up this logjam of non-cooperation and non-communication. Mostly he wanted to direct what he had to say to Kim, but hoped Slim would understand and follow through. He had, of course, no way of knowing that Emmaline had already covered the subject days earlier, or what Kim's response had been.

"When I first came here, I was kinda between a rock and a hard place, too. Nowhere to go and the rest a my life to get there. That mornin' I rode in, nobody knew me... knew nothin' about me. I was just a drifter that Slim wanted off his land. Some bad things happened that day—a story for another time—and by the end of it, Slim musta had a pretty good idea what I was and what kinda trouble might be doggin' my trail. He asked me to stay anyway. He asked no questions and I volunteered nothin'. Figgered soon as that trouble landed on _his_ doorstep, he'd want me gone. But that ain't what happened.

"Every scrape I done got myself and these folks into since then, they've backed me. Even later when Slim found out I had paper out on me, that a lot of what I done mighta been on the shady side of the law, he still gave me the benefit of the doubt. I guess what I'm tryin' to say, Kim, is you should trust _him_. Trust _them_." Jess gestured to include everyone at the table. "These here're good folks. They're fair, they're honest and they're smart. They ain't gonna condemn a man on somebody else's say-so. They'll listen and make up their own minds. Can't ask for fairer than that. But you gotta give 'em somethin' to work with."

Seeing he'd managed to capture Slim's attention, that understanding was beginning to dawn on his friend's face, Jess was confident that Slim now _recognized_ that the more fruitful path to cooperation on Kim's part involved encouragement rather than interrogation. Although Jess had never come right out and said so, it was Slim's persistent, gentle encouragement that had penetrated his own defensive carapace against the world and set him to thinking there just might be some hope for his future. If Slim could do that for him—hardnosed recalcitrant cynic that he'd been, and still reverted to from time to time—then he could do the same for Kim. Unspoken acknowledgment flowed between them and Jess stopped talking.

Slim folded his hands on the table and adopted what he hoped was a composed, unruffled expression.

" **I'm sorry we haven't had the opportunity,** this week, to get to know each other better, Kim. It's not usually this crazy around here. I can certainly understand why you'd be upset about those two posters. I have to admit that if you'd landed any place _other_ than here, you'd probably be right in assuming you'd be turned in for the reward. But that isn't gonna happen. Not here and not with us."

"Why not?" Those gold-brown eyes had resumed boring into him, not yielding an inch. Slim sighed. This wasn't going to be easy.

"I don't know how it is where you come from, but most of us who live here—in this new country—the good people... we do try, to the best of our ability, to live according to certain moral codes in a civilized society. I say 'try' because we can't always live up to the rules. The taking of a life, for instance... that's probably the grossest transgression of all, yet it happens routinely out here... and very few of us lose any sleep over it... unless maybe it was an accident or some other unintentional death. I think I can speak for Jess when I say we've both taken many lives... so many we've stopped counting. We've had to do it to defend ourselves or protect others, but mostly to stop bad people from doing worse than they've already done..."

Sally'd been searching Kim's face, hoping to spot a crack in that impassive façade. "For God's sake, Kim... _tell them!_ Believe me, they'll understand! You don't have to face this alone..." She was rewarded with a small sign... a very tiny sign—an ever so slight softening of the hard lines etched at the corners of his mouth and eyes.

Slim turned to her then. "He told _you_ what happened and why?"

"Yes."

"You believe he told you the truth?"

"Yes."

"And that his actions were justifiable?"

"Absolutely."

Slim nodded his head and relaxed his hands on the tabletop. Everyone was clearly waiting for a pronouncement.

"Then that's good enough for me."

 **There was a collective** _ **uffhhh**_ as everyone let out long-held breaths of relief. A ripple of agreement went around the table. Slim held up a hand... he wasn't done yet, and he readdressed himself to Kim.

"I'm troubled by the fact that neither of those posters specifies what you're supposed to have done... that's highly irregular in itself. They're not substantiated by any recognized law enforcement agency. The rewards offered are beyond any reasonable proportion. No. There's something wrong here and I won't be a party to vigilante justice...

"Until you're able to ride and ready to leave on your own terms, you've got a place here. If word gets out and some bounty hunter comes walzing in thinking he's gonna take you that easily... well, he'll have a fight on his hands."

Heads nodded in enthusiastic accord, except maybe for Jonesy who was, understandably, weary of other people's difficulties interfering with orderly operation of the ranch—most notably the sorts of troubles that had come along right on Jess Harper's heels. But it was Slim's decision and loyalty to him came first. No use pondering on an ill wind until it blew your way.

Andy was pleased because he'd been thinking that too soon—when all this excitement was over and done with—he'd be right back in the same old boat... endless winter months of being stuck indoors and buried under mountains of homework assigned by his brother. This winter he'd have not only Jess but Kim to deflect Slim's attention elsewhere. He had no doubt that either one or both would prove a fund of entertaining stories if only he could get them to open up!

Young Doc and Emmaline were gratified that, of all the issues they'd dealt with over the past week, this last remaining one appeared to have been properly resolved by the family itself... without their intervention.

Jess was very pleased with himself for having been able to successfully influence Slim's thinking toward a beneficial outcome. That was real nice for a change! Keeping Kim safe represented a challenge that he was determined to meet, and the first thing he was gonna do was teach the man how to use a gun! That he could do even from a wheelchair...

Though Kim had given little visual indication that he felt relief or any other emotion, which Slim found slightly disconcerting, he was at least talking now.

"I appreciate all you've done for me so far... and your intentions on my behalf. But you need to be clear on the risks you'll be facing the longer I'm here. These people who're after me..." He gestured to the posters on the table. "They're ruthless. It's not so much a question of retribution, of payback for what happened, but saving face... of preserving family honor. They have the money and the resources and they won't give up. They won't care about who else might be hurt along the way."

"You let us worry about that," Slim said. "We can be pretty rough ourselves... and we've had plenty of practice!"

"You can't run forever," Jess added sagely. "When trouble finds you, better you got your feet on solid ground and folks you trust backin' you up, 'steada havin' it come up from behind."

Kim looked from one to the other and shrugged. "So long as you all understand the danger. I'm no fighter... that's why I keep moving."

"We do. You just concentrate on getting well," Slim said.

 **Kim permitted himself** a small grin. "I _was_ a little worried about which way you'd jump, considering how much money's at stake. But my question still stands... _what about me?_ What contribution can I make? Everyone else seems to have assignments, so what can I do?"

Slim returned a full-fledged smile, dimples and all. "Oh, I have a plan for you. Been thinking about it every since Jess mentioned you said you went to college... never went myself but..." He pointed to his brother. "Andy's going to prep school in St. Louis next year. Most of his schooling's been here at home, first by our mother and then by me. He's gone as far as he can in the school in Laramie... we don't have a high school yet. Half the time we haven't even had an operational primary school and it's next to impossible to find qualified teachers.

"Andy's real smart and he's a good student when he wants to be... but I'm afraid he might be trailing behind his peers who've had the benefit of a formal educational structure like they've got in Cheyenne. I'd feel much better about sending him off if someone with more education than myself was doing the tutoring to get him up to speed."

"You want me to tutor your brother?"

"Yes. Since you're going to be part of this family for the next few months, that'll be _your_ job. If you'll do it. Will you?"

"Well... yeah... sure... I'd like to... but..."

Jess read indecision in Kim's face and stepped in. "You heard the man! Everybody in this family's gotta pull his weight. Whaddya got to lose? You can't ride... and winter's comin' on. Won't be no jobs nowhere. Might as well winter over with us."

Finally Kim grinned. "I'll do it, then... but only if it's okay with Andy."

It was more than okay with Andy... he was smiling from ear to ear.

 **They had finally...** all of them... run out of debatable topics. Sally got up to attend the baby, who'd been sleeping all this time but was now awake and demanding her dinner. Emmaline announced she would be making a fresh pot of coffee and there was peach cobbler if anyone was interested. All hands went up. Young Doc got up to help.

Jonesy shivered, noting the room had got slightly chilly and the fire needed building up. Got up to add more wood to the fireplace.

Slim studied the patterns in the tablecloth, worrying that something might have been overlooked... because that's what a natural-born worrier did. Even when it seemed dead certain all the t's had been crossed and i's dotted.

Jess was quietly introspective, astounded at his own audacity in defense of Kim. Hoping everyone had taken his speech as he'd meant it, not as he'd spoken it... because he wasn't the best speaker in the world. And, he understood with a jolt, he'd only been able to do that because he felt secure within this family. He felt... home.

Andy suddenly realized he urgently needed to visit the convenience and got up to go put on his boots and jacket. Asked if anyone else wanted to walk out with him... not that he was afraid to go alone in the dark, of course. He put a match to the small lantern that was kept by the door for the purpose of lighting the way out back, opened the door... and stopped, open-mouthed.

"Hurry up and close that door, son," Jonesay. "You're letting a draft in."

"It's snowing...!" Andy cried in wonderment. "Look!"

There was general jostling as everyone crowded to the open door... as if no one had ever seen snow before. They couldn't see much beyond the crescent of light put out by Andy's small lantern, but what they _could_ see was magical... as the first snow of the season always is. Enough of the powdery variety had already fallen to coat all visible surfaces—porch rails, part of the floor, the battered rose bushes and some of the yard beyond. What was coming down now were the big wet flakes that would stick and freeze before daybreak.

Yes... the pristine layer of shimmering white was a thin veneer concealing dirt, horse manure and chicken droppings. They knew that. And tomorrow or the next day, depending on how quickly it thawed, moving around the yard would be miserably mucky. But for tonight it was enchanting. For the moment, broken bones, aches and pains of old age, future worries and private sorrows were forgotten.

 _CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE—PART TWO_

 _ **EPILOGUE**_

" _ **My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."**_ _(D.H. Lawrence)_

 **Three weeks later…** In the township of Laramie,life had pretty much returned to normal. The citizenry had buried and mourned their loved ones who'd succumbed to the measles epidemic. Survivors were restored to good health... or at least as good as they'd enjoyed prior to being stricken. The medical community held its collective breath for several weeks in anticipation of a possible cholera outbreak following the flood and then relaxed when that didn't materialize.

The Union Pacific railroad had been a tad over-optimistic in its prediction that the railroad bridge would be rebuilt within a week... it did, in fact, require three weeks. But the wait was worth the result. The new bridge incorporated the new technique called ferroconcrete, in which steel rebar embedded in Portland cement produced a sturdier, more stable structure. The day the bridge reopened to rail traffic was an occasion for celebration.

 _(_ _ **Gracie's note...**_ _UP engineers had the foresight to design a wide enough roadbed to accommodate a second track in the future, but double-tracking didn't come to fruition until forty-eight years later. Never hurts to dream and plan ahead, though.)_

With funds approved by the Laramie town council and financial assistance from the Overland Company, along with donations of surplus matériel from UP, a second bridge was constructed a half mile downstream from the railroad trestle—a single-span truss bridge of concrete, wood and steel pin connections, only a one-laner but adequate for foot and wheeled traffic.

 **Out at the Sherman Ranch...** It took two weeks to clear the blockage at the Hourglass Canyon entrance. There again, UP and Overland engineers put their heads together and used the rubble to widen the roadbed across the canyon so that in future it would be possible—if both drivers were _very_ careful—for two vehicles to pass each other. At Slim's request they also erected safety fencing along the lake side of the road. The residents of the ranch, both two- and four-legged, soon adjusted to the rumble of dynamite blasts and when those finally ceased, readjusted to the normal sounds of nature.

On the day the construction gang decamped, everyone at the ranch stopped what they were doing to watch the procession of wagons roll by on the newly reopened stage road—mainly to admire the eight massive and stately Clydesdales. At eighteen-plus hands and weighing more than a ton apiece, they were the most impressive horses young Andy had ever seen.

The first coach to transit the improved road found something of a Welcome Back party waiting for it at the relay station with streamers, banners, a bottomless coffeepot and three kinds of pie. An unexpected downside to the interruption of service was that the coach horses stranded for the duration had grown fat and sassy and disinclined to accept harness, necessitating reeducation.

The ranch house itself was mostly restored to its pre-Disaster Saturday state... with modifications and improvements:

 **A temporary bunkhouse** was created from the room that had started out as the 'master' bedroom and degraded over the years to a storeroom. That part of the structure was renovated, its roof repaired and reshingled and the walls rechinked and paneled in beadboard. With the installation of two sets of bunkbeds, the two Bobs and Kim moved in. Andy temporarily commandeered the fourth bed just because it was new and he was fascinated by these two individuals who were practically cookie-cutter replicas of his hero. He was a little disappointed by the fact that they were both just regular guys with families, not famous gunslingers or anything special like Jess. But they were nice to him and treated him like one of the boys.

 **The bathhouse** hadn't been altogether decommissioned although the roof had been completed and exterior walls blocked in with rough wood siding. A proper door with a small railed staircase and a temporary ramp opened to the yard. Another door led to a dogtrot which in turn opened into the refurbished bedroom/bunkroom, so that Jess could be wheeled directly from the kitchen to the interim bathroom. An oversize tin bath had replaced the _ofuro_ tubs, which had been returned to Emmaline's house in town. The original smaller tin tub was pressed back into service. The sauna and its _kiuas_ went home with the Koskis but Young Doc had scrounged a miniature potbellied stove to serve as a heat source.

 **The parlor** was reinstated to normalcy with a magnificent antique sofa holding pride of place against the back wall—a contribution from Emmaline who claimed she was redecorating the Prairie Rose in more modern decor. It was a seven-foot-long tulip-carved mahogany Grecian Revival piece, upholstered in gold-and-brown-striped cut velvet with rolled and tucked arms. A pair of octagonal mahogany piecrust occasional tables with apron friezes in a tulip motif completed the setting, along with a matching set of Victorian brass table oil lamps with white glass shades handpainted with tulips. This oasis of elegance was decidedly out of place among the other more homely furnishings, but damn—that was one comfortable sofa! Big enough so that Slim could stretch out on it! (He'd tried to decline the gifts but was overruled.)

 _ **And what of our colorful cast?**_

 **BobCat Kelly and PlumbBob Cooper** stayed on for a while at Overland's expense. They made themselves useful in many ways besides assisting the Koskis in accomplishing the out-of-season branding. Two weeks after roundup day, both Bobs received telegrams advising them that their respective grandmothers, mothers, wives and daughters were in transit via mail packet from Seattle to San Francisco. Emmaline, Sally and Young Doc drove to the ranch in Pearl's surrey for a sumptuous farewell lunch party and carried the Bobs back to town where they caught the westbound train the next morning. BobCat promised to write and made Jess swear he'd keep in contact.

 **Feetrikki 'Feets', Oscari 'Oxtoe' and Roopertii 'Roop' Kalliokoski** were feted at another goodbye party with many thanks, much gratitude and presents, after which a transfer of belongings was effected between the _vardo_ and the Rocking W's rig which had brought out a pair of replacement retired cowboys, Hans 'Ollie' Olsen and William 'Soapy' Waters. Ollie and Soapy planned to stay two weeks before trading out with the next pair.

 **Lindsay "Lychee" McNutt** found reasons to ride out for a visit at least once a week, as Slim was encountering anomalies in his finances that were driving him up the wall and Young Doc hadn't yet given him leave to ride as far as town. Slim had asked Lychee to check into the matter of invoices marked 'PAID' when he knew good and well they hadn't been... not by him anyway. The family attorney professed ignorance but promised to look into it. Though not normally a very sociable sort, the tall Eurasian always made time to talk to Kim in private. If anyone took note of this unusual friendship, they didn't comment on it.

 **Wilfred 'Young Doc' Whatleigh** no longer had time to lavish on the Sherman Problem, finding a backlog of medical emergencies awaiting him at his clinic—including a host of female complainants whose major problem—nausea—turned out to be, collectively, the results of spending too much time pent up indoors with their respective mates... and of people doing what they instinctively do with too much time on their hands and nothing else with which to occupy themselves. June 1871 would thereafter be known as the Year of the Baby Boom.

 **Salviah Louise 'Sally' Whatleigh Lowenstein** drove in from town every Sunday—just for the day—with her son Jacob and her new daughter Tiger Lily (Lychee was working to legalize the adoption). She introduced Jake to her new 'friend' and they took to each other right off—Kim really did have the knack for putting a child at ease. A small complication arose as Jake got it into his head that Kim was his new sister's real daddy and wouldn't be dissuaded. There was no opportunity for a private moment. And probably that was a good thing—she still hadn't come to terms with what she would do about Slim.

 **Emmaline Whatleigh Giancomo** chose Mondays as her visitation day to check up on her 'patients' and particularly to spend time with Jonesy. On one trip she brought along several bottles of hydrogen peroxide and persuaded Kim to let her bleach his hair several shades lighter. One afternoon, a scant hour ahead of Sheriff Corey's pre-announced visit, she drew Kim aside and made him take off his shirt so she could apply theatrical makeup to his back. All he had to do was contrive to be standing shirtless with his back to the door when the sheriff walked in... just long enough for Corey to observe... nothing. The tattoo was effectively invisible if seen at a slight remove. The subterfuge worked very well and didn't need to be repeated.

 **Jebediah 'Jonesy' Jones** finally got Young Doc's blessing to resume normal duties... within reason. He could go back to _light_ cooking and light-duty chores... but no carrying buckets of feed or water, no horse-related duties other than cleaning harness, which was a task he and Jess could do together. Jonesy happily reclaimed the front bedroom, although just a little put out that his roomie had forsaken him to sleep in the new boys' dormitory. He was publicly disgruntled but privately relieved to be informed that Martha Jackson, wife to Avery Jackson, Sally's stable manager, had been engaged by Sally to drive in from town twice a week, Saturdays and Wednesdays, to handle laundry and housecleaning.

 **Andrew 'Andy' Sherman** was declared completely over his measles affliction and free to resume normal activity, although cautioned to bundle up when outdoors and not overtire himself attempting to do three peoples' chores all by himself. As for the dreaded homework, he found himself—surprisingly enough—actually enjoying his sessions with Kim, who made learning fun. Imagine that! And very often Jess, under the guise of reading the newspaper at the other end of the table, would join in with questions and comments. So Andy nurtured a secret amusement that his hero was being educated as well, albeit unknowingly! Every now and then when Jess made a query and Kim gave an answer and Jess indicated he'd understood, Kim would flash a sideways wink at Andy that Jess couldn't see. Oh yes... Kim knew what was happening, too, but wasn't about to embarrass Jess by making reference to it.

 **Matthew 'Slim' Sherman** , still racked with coughing spells, chafed under the doctor's restrictions to limit outdoor activities as long as the weather continued cold and blustery. But he had to admit there was no need for strenuous activity on his part, with the livestock already situated for winter, hay and firewood stockpiled and myriad minor repairs all done around the outbuildings. And he couldn't very well, in his position as role model for Andy, disregard the doctor's orders. He turned his attention to catching up on his reading and bedeviling Jess with bookkeeping.

 **Jess Ewan Harper,** trapped in a wheelchair with that cumbersome cast, despaired of ever being free again. But he was actually sleeping better—the usual nightmares having been replaced by endless columns of numbers. Young Doc had thoughtfully procured an oversized calendar with illustrations of horse breeds, a different one for each month, and hung it on the wall where Peach's finch cage had been. Every morning at breakfast Andy crossed a day off with a big wax pencil. Two pages away, in December, one entry had been outlined in red—the day the cast came off. Jess could hardly wait.

 **Kimball 'Kim' Kahale** , Oahu College, Class of '66, applied himself to tutoring Andy with dedication... and wry amusement at his _unintended_ scholar. When the compass-point neighbors—Bartlett, Gantry, Livingston and Keogh—got wind of the arrangement, they appealed to Slim to allow their younger children to attend 'the Sherman school' as well. Slim agreed, but he and Kim both declined monetary compensation. Instead, the mothers of said children got together and worked out a cooking schedule so that the Sherman household had prepared lunches and dinners delivered four days a week. It was the barter system at its finest and most inventive.

— **THE END —**

 _ **NONIE'S FOOTNOTE:**_ _And that, my friends, is the end of them seven days in the family history that had such a profound affect on all generations to come. A course it ain't the end a the story. They had at least a hard seven weeks ahead of 'em… what with bad weather an' snow on the ground an' no way to git away from each other. I reckon I'll git around ta writin' that up one a these days. But don't hold yer breath. Remember, I'm old an' I'm slow!_

 _ **PREVIOUS REVIEWS…**_ _(_ _ **Author's note:**_ _Many thanks for all the positivity! As you might have noticed, humor's my thing. I didn't want to lose all these lovely comments when reissuing this story, so that's why they're tacked on here.)_

 **Pamela** _(Jul 12, 2016)—I loved this story and would like to print it out as soon as I can get my printer set up and buy it for it, but there is one mistake. It wasn't the measles Andy had. He had the chicken pox. When Andy complained about being very itchy, that gave it away. Chicken Pox itches like crazy. (_ _ **Author's note:**_ _Thanks for the advisory! I double-checked symptoms and measles_ _can_ _be itchy, but not always.)_

 **Yomamma** _(Jun 16, 2016)—I'll be back to read this later. I wish you would have separated the chapters out. It makes the story more doable for some reason. But, this is a fantastic and funny story and I think you're a wonderful writer! Keep up the good work! (_ _ **Author's note:**_ _This story was posted before I learned_ _how_ _to do chapters. Now I do and that's why I decided to reissue.)_

 **Sandy** _(Dec 8, 2014)—This is a terrific story from start to finish - I laughed out loud so many times at your outrageous scenarios. Really enjoy your writing - your imagination and detailed knowledge is such a pleasure to peruse! Many, many more please - especially for Lancer._

 **twobrothers** _(Aug 28, 2014)—You have a quirky sense of humor!_

 **Sally** _(Mar 29, 2014)—Great story , made me laugh ( alot) also made me cry, painted a very vivid picture for me , I will read over and over. Many thanks_

 **Linda L** _(Mar 4, 2014)—I have just finished reading this, and have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable fan fic I have every read. Laughed out loud and could see every delicious scene in my minds eye. Your powers of description are marvellous._

 **kayaklady** _(Feb 21, 2014)—Oh my goodness I haven't laughed so hard in years. What a delight. Several situations reminiscent of the best of the Support Your Local (Sheriff/Gunfighter) movies. And some which would have done the 3 Stooges proud. I can so see the actors having a marvelous time filming this. Thank you so much for sharing._

 **Guest** _(Jan 25, 2014)—A really fun ride. Intelligent, clever writing and an absolute hoot. Highly recommend this story._

 **darspi** _(Jan 23, 2014)—Thoroughly enjoyable entry that took way longer for me to read than usual because I spent so much time having to run to the necessary because I was laughing so hard. Guess I'll buckle down and finish mine while I'm waiting for the installment._

 **jude322** _(Jan 21, 2014)—i absolutely loved this story, your way with words is awesome and your descriptions are absolutely spot on. i could actually see everything happening in my mind's eye. one thing though, four guys named Bob?! not a criticism, just an observation. and don't listen to Harp, it's your asides and your rambling that adds the spice to your stories. eagerly awaiting more from you. thank you_


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